


Feels Like The First Time

by Catchclaw



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Characters Reading Fanfic, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Meta, Parody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-09-17
Packaged: 2017-11-05 11:50:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 28,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Co-created with fanspired. The first time was just a fluke. The second first time? A big misunderstanding. But the <em>third</em> first time? Now wait just a damn minute…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Co-created with fanspired from the Sam/Dean Slash Archive.

The first time was just a fluke.

They were someplace east of Oklahoma City, out in the middle of nowhere, it seemed like. Turned out to be routine: just your average, everyday poltergeist. Investigate, salt, burn, rinse, repeat.

And yeah, maybe Dean had gotten himself a little banged up in the process, but that was pretty much par for the course, right?

It wasn’t his fault that Sam was such a crappy nurse.

They’d been at it for an hour: Dean nursing some cheap tequila, Sam poking and prodding and disinfecting until Dean was completely and thoroughly pissed. And antsy as hell.

“Jesus!” Sam said. “Hold still!”

“Maybe if you weren’t taking all freaking day here, Sammy.”

Sam slid the needle through his skin again. "I'm not the one who put my shoulder through a sliding glass door."

Dean grimaced. “Look, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“An _unlocked_ sliding glass door,” Sam added, dabbing.

Dean grumbled and reached for the bottle.

“Hey!” Sam said. “Leave some for me.”

“Dude,” Dean huffed, clutching the tequila to his chest. “You're not touching this until you're done touching me.”

Sam reached over Dean’s arm, across the table, fumbling for the scissors.

“Whatever,” he said. “You're such a freaking baby about this. God.”

He pulled the thread tight, and fuck, it hurt.

Dean scowled, hunched himself over the bottle. Gritting his teeth. Trying not to prove Sam's point.

He heard the scissors snap and he let his breath out in a rush. Took a long swig and hey, yeah. The booze was getting kinda light.

Sam sighed and Dean felt his fingers sliding over the torn skin.

“Was that the last one?” he asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

"Mmmm," Sam said, prodding. "Think so, but it's so damn dark in here, I can't--" His fingers stopped. "Hmm. Does this hurt?" He pushed.

"Shit!" Dean barked, his body jerking, his knees banging into the table. "Goddamn it, Sam!"

He felt Sam leaning into him, his breath hot on Dean's shoulder.

"Crap," Sam said. "Dude, I can't see it. I can feel it, but—"

His voice trailed off for a second, his fingers still.

"What?" Dean said, twisting around a little. "What is it?"

"Oh!" Sam said, all of a sudden. "It's just that—it's hard for me to see what I'm doing, right here. Can we—could we—could you go sit like on the bed, right next to the lamp? That'd be easier."

Dean heaved a sigh. Or tried to. Kinda hard with Sam latched onto his back like a damn howler monkey.

"Fine," he said, trying to make it clear in a single syllable just how not all right it was. How fucking put out he’d been by the whole goddamn day, practically.

Sam lifted himself away and Dean stood up, cradling the bottle. He took two staggering steps to the bed, crashing heavily next to the nightstand with only minimal spillage. Victory.

"Ugh," he managed, trying to sit up straight. 

The bed squeaked unhappily as Sam crawled in behind him. Reached over and set the peroxide and the tweezers on the nightstand. Or tried to.

"Dude," Dean said, leaning back a little. Resting his back against Sam’s chest. “Maybe you do need a drink, huh? Lookin’ a little shaky there.”

“Heh,” Sam breathed, his voice tangled up in this funny octave. “Yeah, maybe a little.”

He slipped his arm around Dean, skin against skin, and tugged the bottle free. Dean shivered and leaned back again, for some reason, and Sam took a pull right next to his ear, spilled a little over his shoulder, which stung, yeah, but not in a bad way. For some reason.

“This is terrible tequila,” Sam breathed, knocking the bottle into his chest.

Dean grabbed it back.

“Doesn't mean you can spill it all over me,” he said. “If you're not gonna drink it, give me a chance to.”

Sam sat back and stroked Dean's shoulder. Looking for that last bit of glass.

At least, that's what Dean assumed he was doing, because damn, he was taking his time.

Which didn't really seem like a bad thing.

But—

He didn't remember getting cut on his side. Or his neck. Or behind his ear. 

Whatever. Sam was just being through. Just being Sam.

His eyes started to drift shut and he didn't fight it. Felt himself swaying, a little, falling back and forth between the sweeps of Sam's fingers. His hands.

His tongue?

Huh.

He felt Sam's mouth digging into the base of his neck, into the curve of his throat.

Teeth on his ear. Sam's hands sliding around his body, knocking the bottle away.

“Dean,” Sam growled.

“Yeah,” Dean sighed.

He let Sam turn him and then he pushed, shoved his brother into the pillows and tumbled after. Kissed Sam without thinking, by instinct or something, maybe, driving his tongue down, drinking it all in. And it was new and weird, but somehow—it felt right. 

Sam grabbed his head, those long fingers working like an octopus around his ears, his jaw, his neck, panting into Dean's mouth, soft and frantic and so freaking happy that it was kind of amazing, actually.

Dean yanked his mouth free and worked his way down Sam's throat, over and around until he found this awesome place on that long, long neck, under Sam’s ear, that his teeth fit into really nicely and that made Sam moan pretty spectacularly. And thrash in this way that knocked his cock up into Dean's again and again until they were both groaning, until Dean stopped biting and started thrusting, his hips working into Sammy's, slow and deep.

Everything else disappeared: the pain, the light, the room. Hell, even the bed got a little fuzzy. All he could see, all he could hear or touch or even think about was Sam.

Maybe that wasn't so extraordinary, after all.

He stopped rocking, sat up a little and looked down. Sam was flushed and full and open, so fucking open that it was kind of hard to look at. Kind of hard to see all of that love and devotion and ok, want, spilling out of Sam's eyes. Knowing it was for him.

Knowing that Sam was seeing the same in his face.

Sam reached up like he was reading Dean's mind or something. Brushed his fingers over Dean’s cheek, down to his mouth. And in.

“Please,” he breathed, and, yeah: it was the most beautiful thing Dean had ever heard. “Want to be in your mouth. Please.”

Dean kissed his fingers. Smiled.

“Yeah,” he said.

He slid down, pulled Sam open, tugged things away enough so that he could see. Could get his hands on Sam's cock, run his tongue over the soft skin between his thighs.

“Fuck!” Sam cried, his body leaping like a live wire. “Fuck, Dean, please, don't tease me, don't—” 

Something in his voice or his body or both, it grabbed Dean's head, pushed it down, his mouth falling open until he had Sam inside him, as much of Sam as he could take. Until he was stroking and sucking and caressing, hypnotized by his name in Sam's mouth, this long lovely chain of Dean and Dean and Dean.

Sam's hand on his shoulder—the bad one—and it still didn't hurt, didn't matter. 

Nothing else mattered, right then. 

He looked up and Sam was staring right back, looking lost and uncertain and ecstatic all at once.

“Dean,” he whispered. “Love you.”

And then Dean was drowning, swallowing, falling back and feeling Sam's body convulse with pleasure.

Pleasure he'd dug up, dug out of his brother.

Him.

And that realization was like a switch snapping, a key turning, an engine roaring to life. He sat up, planted his knees beside Sam's hips, and unzipped his jeans. Pulled himself out into the air, hanging himself over Sam's body, and working his cock, god, as fast as he could, suddenly desperate and shaking, feeling like his skin was on fire.

“God,” he panted. “Hot, Sammy. I'm so—”

He felt Sam's hand on his hip, the other clamp around his neck. Looked down into Sam's sweet face and saw something sort of awesome and dark fighting with the stupid happy.

“Yeah,” Sam said, licking his lips, looking up into Dean's eyes. “Yeah, Dean. Come. Wanna see you come on me.”

“Oh fuck,” Dean groaned. “Fuck, yes, baby. Yeah.”

His body shivered and the air kind of rippled around them and he shot all over Sam's shirt. His throat. Long white stripes between them. That bound them.

“Come here,” Sam growled, and tugged Dean down until their mouth collided, until their tongues were knotted. Until neither of them could speak.

***

Dean woke up with an elephant on his chest.

For a second, he thought he was having a heart attack.

Then the elephant stirred.

Dean opened his eyes.

Oh. Just Sam.

He relaxed.

Just Sam.

In his bed.

On his chest.

Asleep.

With a big fucking grin on his face.

And why did it smell like Cinco de Mayo?

Uh oh.

He tried to sit up.

Discovered that his fingers were tangled in Sam’s hair.

That Sam’s arm was locked around his waist.

And that he was, apparently, really excited to be awake.

Like, really.

He shifted a little and Sam took a deep breath. Lifted his head, heavy with sleep. 

“Hey,” he said, his mouth still curved, his eyes closed.

“Uh, hey,” Dean stuttered. 

And before he could blink, Sam was kissing him. Soft. Familiar. Like it was an ordinary thing.

“Um,” Dean managed, after a minute. Maybe arching his neck, a little. Offering.

“Hmm?” Sam grinned. Pushing his head down. Accepting.

Dean felt himself rumble, brought his other hand up to hold on. 

Sam hummed again, pleased. Raised his head and opened his eyes. “Yeah,” he started to say, “do that again for m— ”

Their eyes met and Dean watched his brother’s face shoot from sleepy sweet to stunned.

“What the—?” Sam said, yanking himself away, practically bolting off the bed. “Why are you--? What are we—?” He stared down at his shirt, pulled it away from his body. “Is that spunk?” His voice cracked. “Whose spunk is this, Dean?!”

Dean propped himself up on his elbows, his skin still buzzing from Sam’s mouth. “I don’t know, Sammy. Hey, why don’t you break out your junior CSI kit and find out?”

“You think this is funny?” Sam yelped. “How can you think this is funny? God, what did we—?”

Dean rolled his eyes, feeling the happy hum in his body fall away and fucking vaporize. “Dude, I imagine it’s yours or mine. Who else do you see around here?”

Sam started pacing in a tight light circle, his hair as freaked out as his face.

Dean sighed. Trust Sam to blow his gasket over something, ok, a little weird, but hey, not the end of the world here. 

“Look,” he said, “it’s obvious what happened, ok? You got drunk, came onto me, and then we--

“What?!” Sam shouted. “How is that ‘obvious’? God, you are such a freaking egomaniac!”

“Well?” Dean barked back, his voice revving up. “Am I wrong? C’mon, Sammy, don’t you remember?” His brain kicked in, a little, talking about it. “Yeah—you were being a crappy-ass nurse, tending to my wounds or some shit, _yeah_ , and then you got all grabby, started kissing me and—” 

“Bullshit,” Sam said, but he stopped pacing, started staring at Dean, his brow furrowed, his eyes crossed, practically, with the thinking.

Then his face shifted, and oh yeah. There it was.

“Ah ha!” Dean said, jabbing his finger in the air. “See? I knew it!” 

Sam turned his back. Scowling.

Dean cackled, snapped his hands together in glee.

“Oh, man,” he said. “You are never hearing the end of this.”

But then something slipped, fell out of reach, and he couldn’t remember what he was saying. 

Why he was talking. 

Or—

Sam swiveled. Tilted his head, confused.

“Wait—the end of what, Dean?”

“I don’t—” Dean started, staring blankly into Sam’s face. “I thought there was—”

He blinked, his brain suddenly snow. Full of white noise.

Sam shook his head, his body, like a wet dog.

They frowned at each other for a minute.

“Um,” Sam said finally. “I’m gonna get in the shower.”

“Yeah,” Dean said faintly, watching him retreat. Hearing the door slam. “Ok.”

They spent the rest of the morning in a fog: bumping into each other, spilling coffee, cursing.

There was something, Dean kept thinking, something nagging at the back of his mind. Something weird, or different, or—

But then Sam threw a fit over Dean playing _Hell’s Bells_ for the fifth time in a row, and Dean went on a tear about Sam’s shocking lack of appreciation for culture that was actually good, that anyone had heard of outside of some goddamn freshmen seminar, and then Sam pointed out that Dean was full of shit because he’d never actually _been_ in a freshman seminar, which led to an argument about _Saved by the Bell: The College Years_ that was frankly embarrassing for all involved.

And whatever it was between them just disappeared, fell right the fuck away, under that, and neither of them thought anymore about it. 

Forgot about it, in fact. Like it had never happened.

Except.

Except, for weeks afterwards, Dean would find himself staring at this spot on Sam’s neck, for some reason. Right behind his ear. And when he did, this weird kind of hum came over him, ran through his body. It felt like—like something good.

But he couldn’t figure out why, exactly.

So he dismissed it.

Which, in retrospect, was where the problem started. Him ignoring his instincts, like that.


	2. Chapter 2

The second first time? That was just a misunderstanding.

They were in Beeville, Texas. Tiny tiny little place. Couple thousand residents. Abandoned military base.

They’d been chasing reports of some kind of creature, a dark figure in the scrub brush that had been terrorizing people two towns over for almost a month. And now the thing seemed to have moved on to Beeville, which made it easier, in a way, ‘cause there were like very few people around for it to fuck with.

But after some initial excitement on their first night in town: nothing. Radio silence.

So three days in a dusty motel later, nerves were getting frayed.

Tempers, too. Especially Dean’s.

At dinner, he’d bitched at Sam for turning his nose up at dessert, which, ok, Sam did all the damn time. But still. For some reason, tonight? That’d just hit him the wrong way.

Sam didn’t say much. Just shook his head and sighed and spaced out in that way that said: what-the-fuck-ever, Dean.

Back at the motel, Dean jumped in the shower, more for the privacy than anything else. Left Sam with his laptop and some _Mr. Belvedere_ reruns.

He was pissed. Felt itchy and tight. Claustrophobic. He worked through two bottles of shampoo and most of the soap, trying to push it out, wash it away. 

Didn’t work.

So when he came out of the bathroom and found Sam gone—the TV on, the laptop on the table, yeah, but Sam? Gone.—it hit like every panic button in the book. 

And it was irrational. He knew Sam hadn’t gone anywhere, deep in his gut, he knew. But something overrode that certainty. Something kept pushing at his head, at his heart, shoving him right the fuck towards manic.

Which was crazy, right?

He tucked the towel tighter around his waist and started pacing, a thousand maybes shooting through his head, pouring out of his mouth.

What if? Sam had been kidnapped? No sign of forced entry. Salt line was intact.

What if? One of the God Squad had bagged him? Unlikely. No telltale smell of righteousness lingering in the air.

What if? Sam had run away again? 

And that’s the one that really made him sick, made him stagger to the dresser and press his palms down. Panting.

No.

No no no.

No. He wasn’t losing Sam again. Not like this. Not in the middle of Bee-fucking-ville, Texas. Not over Dean being a complete ass for no good reason. Again. Goddamn it! What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he just accept that Sam was the best thing to ever happen to him, the best thing in his fucked-up life, hands down? Why did he have to keep pushing his brother away, when he really just wanted to—

The door opened and Sam strolled in, Hostess Cupcakes clutched in his hand.

“Hey,” he said, reaching back to lock the door. “What’s up?”

Dean practically flew across the room, threw himself into Sam, slammed them both back into the door.

“Whoa!” Sam managed. “Watch the cupcakes, dude.”

Dean knocked the cupcakes away with a growl, feeling that hum crawl up over his skin again. 

It felt really, really good.

He reached up and grabbed Sam’s head. Pulled it down until they were eye-to-eye.

“Sammy,” he breathed, his voice teary, his heart echoing in his ears.

He felt Sam’s arms close around him.

“Dean,” he said, confused. Concerned. “What is it?”

“Not gonna lose you,” Dean sighed, stroking Sam’s face. “Can’t lose you again. I can’t.”

Sam chuckled. Squeezed him, a little.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I just went to the vending machine.”

Dean shifted, pushed his hips into Sam’s and felt the towel get a little wobbly. But it didn’t matter, he had to be close, had to tell Sam that—

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never meant to drive you away. It’s just that I—” His voice trembled and he felt a tear slip down, fall over his face. 

Sam’s fingers slid over his cheek. Caught it. His mouth close. So close.

“Shhh,” he said. “I was just craving cupcakes. And they had the orange ones. You know, with the matching icing?”

“Yes,” Dean murmured, his mouth working over the lump in his throat. “God. Love you so much, Sammy. Please. Don’t leave. Don’t leave me.”

“I’m right here,” Sam whispered. “Right here.” 

But it wasn’t enough. Still wasn’t close enough. 

So Dean arched his neck, pulled Sam’s head to his, and kissed him. 

It felt kind of vaguely familiar, Sam’s mouth, like a place he’d been to before, but that didn’t make any sense because he’d never—

They’d never—

He felt Sam’s arms lock around his waist. Yank him closer.

He kept one hand curled around Sam’s head and pulled the other down, pushed into Sam’s coat and past all of his goddamn shirts to get to his skin. His chest. Reveled in the way Sam jerked as he stroked, as he moved his fingers over Sam’s ribs. Dug his fingernails into his side.

Sam made this amazing noise and got his fingers under the towel, tugged the stupid thing away and shoved his hands down into Dean’s hips. 

Dean’s head snapped back and he moaned, feeling his whole body shake with it, with Sam.

“Yeah,” Sam hissed into his face. “Yeah, Dean.” 

He spun them around, pushed Dean’s back against the door, and dropped to his knees. Didn’t give Dean time to think or breathe or blink, just took his hips back and nuzzled his cock. 

Dean felt his knees buckle, reached out and clamped his hands on Sam’s shoulders. Trembling.

“Mmmm,” Sam purred into his cock. “Yeah. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” He slid a hand over and caressed him, just a little. Just enough so that Dean started shaking in earnest, little pleading noises dripping from his tongue.

“‘S ok,” Sam whispered, looking up into his eyes. “Got you. Not going anywhere. I’m right here.” 

Something in Dean gave way, with that look.

If Sam was here. If he had Sam. Everything would be ok. It had to be.

He groaned and pushed his hips forward. Asking. Offering.

Sam sighed. And took him in. Accepting.

Maybe it was the desperation. Or the panic. Or Sammy’s beautiful, talented tongue. Whatever it was, Dean came so fast and hard that his body swayed, folded. Fell over into Sam.

Who held him. Let him come all the way back down.

Then took him to bed. Gave himself up in return, and wow, did the boy have a lot to give.

***

He woke up with a vague sense of unease, like he’d fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence. Had this feeling that there was something he should know, something he should remember—should try to, anyway.

But he looked over at Sam in the other bed, deep and sweet and asleep, and everything seemed so good, so all right with the world that he closed his eyes again and slept.

And of course, when he woke up—neither of them remembered a thing.


	3. Chapter 3

But the third first time? Ok, now wait just a goddamn minute.

Sam’s eyes widened. 

“What do you mean, we’ve done this before?” he panted, his fingers still closed around their cocks, still slick with come.

“Don’t you,” Dean managed, still shivering, still reeling from watching himself go to pieces in Sam’s hand. “Um. Doesn’t this seem familiar?”

Sam looked down. Looked back up.

“Um,” he said. “I think I’d remember you coming like a fucking freight train like that, Dean.” 

He licked his lips and Dean moaned, grabbed at his shoulders and put his tongue back where it belonged, lost somewhere in Sam’s throat. Pushed until they were stretched out in the backseat, a tangle of arms and legs threatening to send them both over the edge.

Dean sat up after, uh, a while. His breath coming in great gasps, his face flushed, his cock real interested in rejoining the conversation.

“Sam,” he said. Serious. “We’ve done this before.”

Sam’s face narrowed. “What?” he said tightly. “No, we haven’t, Dean.”

He started to sit up, but Dean grabbed his shoulder. Planted him firm.

“Yes, we have,” Dean insisted. “Not here, not in the car. But—we’ve—had sex before.”

Sam opened his mouth to protest.

“No, yes, god, shut up, Sammy!” Dean barked. “Listen. Don’t you remember? Last month in that little town in Texas? The one with the busted-up troll? And before that, a couple a months ago, in Oklahoma? When I put my shoulder through a glass door?”

Sam’s mouth flapped open and shut again in rapid succession.

Thinking. 

Then he said: 

“Why didn’t you say something before?”

Dean let him go and sat back.

“Because I forgot, ok? I kept forgetting. It’s only right after we—after I come or whatever that I can remember. But it’s only for a little while. Then it gets all fuzzy again, at least until we—”

“Until we fuck,” Sam finished. “For the first time. Again.”

“Pretty much,” Dean said.

“Huh,” Sam said thoughtfully. “That’s weird.”

“Tell me about it,” Dean muttered. He looked down. “Dude, I need a towel,” he said. “Man, I am a goddamn mess.”

Sam blinked. Shook his head.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Dean. It’s light outside.”

“No shit,” Dean said, scrubbing his hands on his jeans, trying to stuff everything back into place.

“No,” Sam said. “It’s light. It’s like, the middle of the day. And we’re on the side of the road!”

Dean froze.

“Aren’t there at least some trees around or something?” 

Sam shook his head, bit his lip.

“No,” he hissed. “We’re right next to the road. And there are _cars_ , Dean!”

“What?!” Dean barked. He tried to scootch back into the seat, into Sam.

“Hey!” Sam barked. “Don’t lay back down on me, dude! There isn’t room enough for both of us down here!”

“Is to! There was a minute ago,” Dean huffed, ducking his head down. “When we were kissing, there was plenty of room!”

“Whatever,” Sam said. “There isn’t anymore!”

He started wrestling with his own zipper, his face dipping straight into bitch mode.

“Whose idea was this, anyway?” he whined. 

“Uh,” Dean said. Remembering.

Remembered looking over and watching Sam yammering on about something, suddenly seeing, like really _seeing_ , that cool beautiful mouth for what it was. What it would feel like on his cock. 

Remembered turning the wheel, hard, reaching for Sam with one hand and opening his fly with the other. 

Remembered panting: “Backseat. Now.”

Oh crap.

Sam frowned, struggled to sit up. “What?” he asked, and now his mouth didn’t look awesome so much as twisted. Pissed. Unhappy.

“Shut up,” Dean huffed, shoving the door open. Banging his way back into the front seat. Feeling that awesome happy hum leap right the fuck out of him. Which sucked.

Sam slid in beside him, scowl deepening until it threatened to swallow his face.

Dean turned the key and she came to life under his hands. He nudged her back onto the road. Trying to ignore the waves of unhappy that were radiating from Sam. 

“Dean,” Sam said. Finally. “What’s going on?”

Dean sighed.

“I told you. I only remember at little bit.” He turned, meeting Sam’s eye for a second. And yeah, that was plenty. “What—what about you?” he said. “You remember anything?”

Sam matched his sigh.

“A little,” he admitted. “Not much. So—”

He reached down and scrabbled under the seat. Came up with a pen and grabbed a napkin. Started scribbling. Saw Dean staring.

“Making notes,” he said, trying to balance the napkin on his knee. “So we don’t forget again.”

“Huh,” Dean said. “So it’s like _Memento_. But with incest.”

They both winced.

“Quick!” Sam said, writing furiously. “Tell me what you remember!”

“What’s the rush?” Dean said. “We’ve got at least another three hours before we’re—”

“No, seriously,” Sam insisted. “Can’t you feel it? It’s fading, already. C’mon, Dean, just tell me what you remem—”

His mouth hung open, his lips moving without purpose.

“Wait,” he said, frowning. “What was I saying?”

Dean rolled his eyes. Shrugged. “Hell if I know, Sam. You’re always yammering about something.”

Sam looked down at the notes in his lap. Picked them up. 

Stared.

“Oh my god!” he yelped. “Dean! We just had sex. In the car!”

“What the—!” Dean barked, wrenching the wheel, scaring the hell out of a passing minivan.

“And it was your idea!” Sam yelled.

“Sam!” Dean shouted. “Slow down. What the hell are you talking about?” 

Sam took a deep breath. 

“Apparently, it’s like _Memento_. But with incest.”

Wasn’t any better the second time around.

***

So Sam figured that, in theory, writing it down would make it easier to track. Easier to find a pattern. To figure out what was happening to them. Between them. 

And it was weird, looking over what Sam had written. What they had. Because at some level, Dean didn’t remember it. At all. The logistics? The order of events? All foggy and obscure.

But at another—what it felt like? what he felt like, in those moments? Well. He didn’t tell Sam everything, didn’t give it up to posterity, or whatever. Kept some of the things he remembered to himself.

What he did share, Sam recorded, first in black and blue ink smeared all over gas station napkins, and then on paper, and then typed up on the laptop.

Which was just creepy, seeing it on the screen, like that. Spelled out and final.

Incomplete.

And it kind of got between them, for a while. Became the elephant in the room for a couple of weeks. 

Dean was extra careful not to stomp around in a towel.

Or to stare at Sam’s mouth. 

And he noticed that Sam made sure to leave a note if he so much as went out to the car to get something. 

And that he went out of his way not to touch Dean. Ever.

But, after a while, it started to feel less urgent. Just became one more thing to worry about and, in the face of the incoming Apocalypse and all, the fucking-each-other thing kinda fell by the wayside. Dropped to the end of the list.

Sammy stopped worrying about it—out loud, at least.

And Dean? Well. Dean wasn’t really that invested in worrying about it in the first place.

So by the next time—the first time—almost a month later? It snuck up on him, too.


	4. Chapter 4

The ‘Pala got pissy, broke down a couple of hours outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. Where there was a whole lotta nothing. At least that’s what it seemed like at two o’clock in the morning.

“Fuck me,” Dean bitched, stomping ahead of Sam. “Dude, my baby never breaks down! Never! That’s the last time I trust anyone—anyone!—to touch her insides but me.” 

“Ew,” Sam said. “You do realize you’re fucking codependent with that car.”

Dean stopped, drew himself up. Tried to glare up at Sam in the thready moonlight.

“She is not ‘that car,’ dickweed. She’s—” he paused, searching for just the right word. “She’s our home, Sam.”

“Pffft,” Sam scoffed, pushing him aside and trudging on. “Whatever. You are such a goddamn girl about that thing.”

Dean just stared at his back, glowering. Feeling the fucking heat-ray pour out of his skull.

Sam didn’t notice.

And after a minute, Dean realized how tired he was. How hot. How thirsty. 

He just wanted to be done for the night. Damn it.

“Fine, Columbus!” he shouted, way louder than was necessary. “Where the fuck are we going, exactly?”

Sam stopped. Pointed at—something in the dark, something that Dean couldn’t quite see.

“Barn,” Sam said. “At least it’ll be dry.”

Dean frowned. “What? It’s totally clear out here. What do we care if it’s—”

Lightning snapped overhead and Dean jumped straight up. Saw Sam’s grin like a pop gun in the gloom.

“Like I said,” Sam drawled. “Dry. C’mon.”

They ducked off the road, started scurrying towards the shape that Sam was so goddamn sure was there. Almost made it, too, but not quite.

Sam got the door open, finally, but Dean was already soaked, madder than a wet cat.

“Goddamn it,” he huffed. “You better’ve put your window up in the Impala, Sam.”

Sam pushed the door closed and turned, water sliding over his face, his clothes a solid sheen.

“Really?” he scoffed. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a fucking downpour, and you’re worried about the CAR? What did I tell you, man? You’re fucking obsessed with that thing!”

The rain kicked up a notch. Started pounding on the roof, dripping a little through the eaves. 

“Hey!” Dean shouted, moving towards him, probably, because it was really fucking dark, now, with only the occasion flash to point his fury in the right direction. “Look, Sammy, it was your idea to get out and walk around. You were just sure we’d find something, find somebody to help, or whatever.”

There was a flash, again, but this time Sam was a blur. Looked like his shirt was over his head, or something.

“Dude,” Sam said, pouring a month’s worth of pissy into a single word. “The law of averages suggests that, given our distance from the city, and given the urban density of—”

“Oh fuck me,” Dean growled. “What-the-fuck-ever. Shut up about your average laws of crap.”

Sam huffed, and whoa, he was a lot closer than Dean thought.

Dean watched him kick his boots away. Peel off his wet jeans. Dean’s mouth got just a little drier. Felt his heart start buzzing. Just a little.

“Dean,” Sam said through his teeth. “Just take off your fucking clothes and hang ‘em up to dry. By the time the storm passes, it’ll be almost light, and we can make it back to the car before the sun comes up.”

“Fine!” Dean shouted, yanking his shirt over his head. Realized he was breathing kind of hard. For some reason.

“Fine!” Sam shouted back, and the lightning broke again, and Dean got a good look at him. At Sam. Like, all of him. That long torso. Those big arms that were stretched out. Reaching for—him? 

Snagging his waist. Pulling him close. Pushing them hip to hip.

“Um,” Dean said. “Sam. What’re you—?”

“Stop talking,” Sam hissed, the words rolling across Dean’s cheek. Dripping into his mouth. He threaded one hand through Dean’s belt, slid the other up into his hair.

Pushed his way into Dean’s mouth and set up shop there for a while, his tongue silky and hot, his lips slippery and insistent. 

And his hands? Grabby. Really fucking possessive. 

Dean started to pant, to burn, to a little. His body started shaking, started trying to bolt in five directions at once.

“This is—what are you doing?” he gasped, eventually, trying to pull away, feeling a weird hum rising in his chest. “Sam, this isn’t ok! It’s—”

Thunder echoed in his ears. Proving his point.

But Sam held him fast. Sighed, this big rush of breath over his face.

“No,” he murmured. “It’s not. But is that a bad thing?”

And he totally cheated, asking, ending his question as his fingers ran over Dean’s cock. As his tongue flicked over Dean’s lips. Teasing.

“God,” Dean groaned, his head falling back. “ _God_. Stop it, Sam.”

And he meant it, too, damn it, but he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t help but shudder and push himself into Sam’s hand like it was a reflex. Instinct.

Like it was somewhere he’d been before.

“What?” Sam cooed, swooping down to kiss him again. Sam’s words were soft, somehow louder than the rain. His fingers digging. Tugging at Dean’s zipper. “What do you want?”

Dean opened his mouth but nothing came out. No words, anyway.

Sam raised his head. Took his mouth away.

“Tell me,” he demanded, his voice breaking over the storm. 

Dean rocked forward into Sam’s fingers, helpless. 

“No,” Sam barked, dropping his hand, leaving Dean’s hips straining into the air. “Damn it, Dean. Tell me! Or I won’t—”

“Fuck!” Dean groaned, reaching for him, his body, that fucking awesome buzz, beating back his better judgment. “Goddamn it—” 

Sam didn’t move, didn’t come back, and something worked its way out of Dean’s throat, something completely him and not him. Sounded like:

“Sam!” he moaned. “Please, Sammy, touch me. God, just—” 

He felt hands on him in the dark, his zipper dropping, finally. Big warm fingers on his cock. That heavy voice in his ear again.

“Mmm,” it said. “Keep talking.”

***

“Shit,” Sam said, after. “Do you have a pen?”

***

The next day, they sat staring at the laptop. At Sam’s notes. Silent. Glum.

“So,” Sam said.

“So,” Dean said.

The cursor blinked back, oblivious.

“Maybe we should ask for help,” Sam said finally.

Dean snorted.

“Oh, please,” he scoffed. “You wanna call Bobby? I’ll pay good money to listen in on that.”

Sam blushed.

“No,” he said, swallowing. “I don’t want to. But I also don’t wanna keep having sex with you.”

Dean blinked. 

Oh. Ok.

And it wasn’t that he was offended, exactly, but it must have shown in his face because Sam’s eyes softened. He reached for Dean’s arm.

“I mean,” Sam said, “it’s just that—”

“Yeah,” Dean finished, jerking himself away. “Don’t girl out on me, dude.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed.

“Fine,” he said. “Whatever. I’m just saying. We need to figure this out.”

He pushed back from the table and stood up. His dumb hair not quite hiding the hickeys on his neck.

“Goin’ for a walk,” he huffed. “Be back.”

Dean watched him go. Leaned his chin into his palm and sighed.

Resisted the urge to hit “delete.” To erase everything, to put all of it out of their minds, for good.

Until the next time. The first time.

Because. 

Here was the thing. 

The thing he didn’t really want to admit, but now that Sam had been a bitch about it, he kinda had no choice but to look it right in the face. To accept it.

He wasn’t all that fired up to solve this mystery.

He was actually kinda—ok with it.

Which, wow. Whole new levels of fucked-up to add to his repertoire, sure.

But one thing he’d never been good at was lying to himself. Ignoring? Repressing? Sometimes. But flat-out lying? Not something he could really manage.

So. 

He. Dean Winchester. All good with the incest. With the whole sleeping-with-Sam thing. With letting Sam touch him and kiss him and say his name when he came.

At first? Ok, yeah, maybe it had been a little weird, in retrospect. But then, over time, over more times, as they started to talk about it, write it down, remember it on paper?

It kind of grew on him.

And what was confusing was that, in the moment? 

Moments. 

Sam seemed cool with the whole thing, too. 

More than cool. Seemed way, way into it. Into him. 

In love with—?

No. He wasn’t going down that particular road. But still. Point stood. 

Sam, in those moments, when neither of them knew any better, apparently? Was all his. 

And maybe he was a selfish bastard, but he wanted that. Needed that. And if sex was (apparently) the way to get it, to get Sam? Then he was ok with that.

It felt like a gift.

But.

Sam? Was not ok with it.

Sam? Wanted it to stop.

Sam? Was freaked out by it. By him.

So. They’d figure it out. 

And they’d stop.

And if that broke his heart a little, then fine. Whatever.

Sam came first.

Well, sometimes. 

Under these circum—

Oh, fuck it.

His phone rang and he was so eager to get out of his own head that he picked it up without looking, without checking the number first.

“Hello?” he said. 

“Dean?” a bottle of Johnnie Walker asked.

“Chuck!” Dean said, suddenly alert. “What is it? What’s wrong? You have a vision?”

“Dean,” Chuck said again, and Dean could hear him wincing. “You’re alone?”

Dean looked around automatically, then felt like an idiot.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

Chuck sighed, a balloon deflating right inside Dean’s ear.

“Open a browser window,” Chuck managed.

“What?”

“On the laptop,” Chuck said, carefully, like he wasn’t totally sure if he trusted himself to speak English. “Computer. Internet. Get on it.”

Dean cocked the phone on his shoulder and poked at the keys.

“Ok,” he said after a minute. 

“Soooo,” Chuck slurred. “Go to this address.” He spat out a long series of letters and symbols that Dean couldn’t follow, couldn’t type fast enough, and it took them five minutes and three tries and by the time the damn webpage had opened, Chuck’s buzz had started to wane and he sounded more than a little pissed about that.

“Jesus,” Chuck breathed. “Now I know why it’s always ‘Sam’s laptop’ this and ‘Sam’s laptop’ that. No wonder you only go to one porn site. Probably the only one you can find.”

“Hilarious,” Dean snapped. “Explain to me why I’m looking at this—whatever it is. Wait. Is this one of your fan sites?”

He looked at the banner: a car— _his_ car—parked in a field or something, starry night overhead, knocked-down fence just behind and two silhouettes stretched out on the hood, _Wayne’s World_ -style, heads tilted towards a half-moon.

Above it, the site’s title in swirly, curvy script: _Undisclosed Desires_.

Dean groaned.

Chuck took a long, wet drink of something. Spilled some of it on the phone, sounded like.

“‘S one of yours,” he said, giggling. “Your fans, Dean. One. A person who is a fan. Of yours.”

“Ok, Sloshy,” Dean gritted. “I got it. Now what the fuck is so important about it?”

There was another pause. A rustle of papers. Some banging. A loud “FUCK!”

“Chuck?” Dean barked. 

“Sorry,” Chuck said. A little breathless. “Had to lie down. Forgot how. ‘S ok now.” He sighed. “You need to read this site, Dean. I mean, _read_ it. Because I think—I mean, the visions think—that it’s important. It’ll help with that little problem you and Sam are having right now. You know, the one with the forgetting and all?”

Dean turned like four shades of red. Resisted the urge to chuck the phone across the room. So to speak.

“Oh, jesus, Chuck. I didn’t know that you could—”

“Dean,” Chuck said. Patient. “Read it. This site. This fan of yours. Her name was Grace. She was—trying to give you something. Didn’t work out right, exactly, but she was trying.”

Dean was scrolling, and the page—pages!—stretched out ahead of him like that terrible _House Hunters_ marathon that Sam forced him into last week. There was link after link after link, what looked like story titles and descriptions and oh god. Goddamn it.

“But I don’t understand. What does all this—fan fiction or whatever have to do with Sam and me? With what we’re, uh, doing?”

Chuck laughed, the ice in his glass chiming in.

“You’ll figure it out,” he said. “I know. I’ve seen it. Just don’t tell Sam, ok? You gotta do this one all on your own.”

“What?” Dean barked. “That doesn’t make any sense! Why can’t I ask Sam for help?”

“The prophet Chuck has spoken,” Chuck intoned. “So say we all.”

And he hung up.

And took his phone off the hook, apparently, because Dean got a fast busy again and again and again until finally, he gave up. Finally, he turned back to the site. To those pages and pages, god, of writing about he and Sam. Or their fictional counterparts, or whatever. 

He sighed. Started to scroll up, heading for the top of the page, when he heard a key in the lock.

He made it to the banner, burned the title into his brain, and wiped the history because, hey, he wasn’t a complete moron about online stuff. He was just more selective in his knowledge. Than some people.

Sam wandered in, a six-pack of IPA in his hand.

He held it up. Sheepish.

“Sorry I was a dick,” he said.

“Nah,” Dean said. “It’s ok. Me too.”

They spent the evening watching _The Transporter_ and arguing over Statham’s relative awesomeness, Dean making a strong case for “more awesome than Jet Li” and Sam pushing back hard with the “poor man’s Jean Claude Van Damme” position, and everyone ended up in their own bed with appropriate clothing in place, relative virtue in tact, and damn if Dean wasn’t a little disappointed. 

Oh well.

He pushed his way under the covers, thinking. Lay there in the dark, listening to Sam wheeze. Trying to figure out how he was going to weasel the laptop away from his brother for a few hours.

Because he had some serious homework to do.


	5. Chapter 5

So Grace was dead.

Dean figured that out pretty quick.

Hell, Chuck had practically said as much.

But it wasn't until he clicked on the "About" page, on this little link tucked above the banner, that it kind of sank in for Dean, that fact.

Grace hadn't said a lot about herself there: web designer for a nonprofit, _Supernatural_ fan (of course), birdwatcher.

Woman with cancer. Melanoma. Something she described as "a wendigo devouring her from the inside out."

But that was it, really. All she'd chosen to say about who she was.

It wasn't until after she'd passed that any details had been added. Any hint of who'd she'd really been, outside of her writing. And her apparent obsession with starlings.

One of her friends had posted a comment noting the date of her death: just over six months ago. Just a date and "I miss you already" and that had done it, broken open the dam and spawned dozens of other comments, readers and friends posting little sketches and cropped photos, bits of poems and memories of that awful conference in Dayton, of the time she stole a taxi in college, of the romance novels she was always buying and never finishing.

Of the horrible Elmo doll that she’d hidden in the ceiling of her co-worker's office, tucked up inside the tiles where it chattered and sang for a week until her co-worker was convinced the office was haunted, possessed by some deranged child, until Grace staged a fake exorcism in the middle of a conference call, slinging salt and chanting Rush lyrics and generally being an ass until she sprang Elmo from his lofty tomb, and then, only then, cracking like a walnut and howling, had the whole office laughing like idiots and thank god for the mute button on the speakerphone, right?

Yeah. She sounded kind of okay.

And she may have been dead, but she’d left a hell of a legacy for herself: a whole freaking site crammed full of stories and ficlets and some kinds of fanart that Dean wasn’t ready to handle just yet.

He’d never wanted to see himself as a cat.

So he focused on the writing, on the reading, on sneaking an hour here, 20 minutes there, an afternoon now and again, and learned that Grace had a thing for first times.

Like, a really big thing.

While her early stuff, posted a few years before, was more diverse, the stories she’d put up in the last year, the year before her death, were all first times. All of them.

Sam leading. Him leading. Mutual instigation. In the car. In a hotel. In a field, more than once. In an elevator. In an airplane. In gas stations. In fancy hotels, with downy covers and silk sheets and imported beer. In their house back in Lawrence. On an air hockey table. In the snow.

After stabbings or gunshots or possessions. In the middle of a fist fight. In the shower. After drinking. After confession. At night. During the day. Late in the afternoon, with the sun cutting in the curtains, Sam’s body painted with these long stripes of light as they kissed, stretched out on the bed like there was all the time in the world.

There was angry sex. Or sad. Sex for comfort. For pleasure. Sex that was awkward and funny. That was anxious and hot.

Sam coming. Dean coming. Alone. Together. On each other. Inside each other. Becoming part of each other.

But in all of them, all of those first-time stories, there was this:

In the end, Dean was happy.

In every one, Dean got to live happily ever after. With Sam.

In a cabin. In a ranch house. In the suburbs. On the road. Curled together in bed, not knowing if they’d have another time like that again. Sitting on the couch yelling at ESPN, pelting each other with candy corn. Arguing over whose turn it was to walk the dog, take out the garbage, put gas in the car. Entwined in front of a fireplace, fucked out and cross-eyed and so happy neither of them could see straight.

In all of them, in every one: in the end, Dean was happy. 

And at first it bothered him, a little, all of that love pouring off the pages, for him, because even he could feel it, that sense that Grace had yearned for (admittedly fictional) him to get what _he_ wanted, or what she’d decided that he wanted, anyway. For him to be content with his life, not just running or fighting or dying, but settled, at least enough so he wasn’t looking over his shoulder every moment of every damn day.

In her work, in those words, he saw a hundred different possibilities, different ways of living, of being that frankly seemed a little weird, but that’s what made them seem kind of awesome, too. Possibility wasn’t really something he liked to dwell on, in real life, and it was cool to take a tour through someone else’s reckoning of how he might find happiness.

Honestly? He couldn’t remember anyone ever caring that much about it. Even him.

So after a few weeks, after he’d gotten through a lot of her work, he’d warmed up to Grace. Gotten to like her, even if she used the words “growled” and “hips” and “wetly” too often. If she talked about coming like it was a religious experience or something, always somebody “shattering” or “falling” or “breaking” apart in someone else’s hand or ass or mouth.

If she spent way more time describing Sammy’s cock than his, too much time explaining how much Dean liked to be kissed, or lingered over how Sam wanted it hard and fast and he wanted to take his time, drive Sam completely nuts first and then fuck him out nice and slow until they were both goners.

If she always made him look like the sensitive one, in bed, Sam flipping from choir boy to sex god with Dean all needy and “pliant”—ah, that was another one—and begging, always with the begging, for Sam to touch him. To fuck him. To never leave him.

Maybe that one hit a little too close to home, was all.

But he still couldn’t figure out why Chuck had pointed him here, exactly, what he was supposed to be getting out of all this.

What in the hell this had to do with Sam and him. With real life.

He sighed and rolled his fingers over the keys. He’d been at it for an hour while Sam was geeking out at the local library or getting coffee or whatever the fuck he’d said this morning, and now Dean’s eyes were tired. Scratchy. He felt itchy, like he needed to run around the block.

But. One more story.

He hadn’t been reading in any kind of order, not really, and it had gotten hard to keep track of what he’d looked at and what he hadn’t. They all started to blend together after a while, this big wordy soup of sex and Sam and him, of kisses and sighs and a little bit of blood, of come and love and cheap beer pouring out over the sheets.

So he open a page, scrolled down, and just clicked at random.

“Now That I’ve Found You,” it was called.

He rolled his eyes. Oh boy. _Little on the clichéd side, Grace_ , he thought.

He checked the clock again and started rolling, moving faster through the text than he usually did. Wanting to check this one off the list and get once step closer to calling Chuck and saying “What the fuck?”

And then something caught his eye.

He froze.

He swallowed.

He read it again.

> _Sam slid the needle through his skin again. "I'm not the one who put my shoulder through a sliding glass door."_
> 
> _Dean grimaced. “Look, it seemed liked a good idea at the time.”_
> 
> _“An_ unlocked _sliding glass door,” Sam added, dabbing._

Wait. Wait just a damn minute. That sounded like—

> _Dean grumbled and reached for the bottle._
> 
> _“Hey!” Sam said. “Leave some for me.”_
> 
> _“Dude,” Dean huffed, clutching the tequila to his chest. “You're not touching this until you're done touching me.”_

Oh shit.

He’d said that.

He _remembered_ saying that, back in Oklahoma, right before they’d—

Had sex. For the first time. The actual first first time.

What in the—?

He kept reading, still disbelieving, still not really processing what he was seeing until:

> _Sam was flushed and full and open, so fucking open that it was kind of hard to look at. Kind of hard to see all of that love and devotion and ok,_ want _, spilling out of Sam's eyes. Knowing it was for him._
> 
> _Knowing that Sam was seeing the same in his face._

It hit him hard, reading that. Like an elbow to the throat. He choked.

Because, god. He’d felt that. He remembered that moment: looking down and seeing Sam’s face and thinking about what his own must look like, right then.

But what in the hell? How could Grace have known—he checked the posting date: almost a year ago!—that he and Sam would come to that place, that he'd break himself and Sam would try and fix him and they'd end up in bed with a bottle of tequila between them, Sam's tongue knotted in his own, his fingers sliding over Sam's chest, breaking over each other in waves?

Ok, maybe he'd been reading too much of this stuff.

He read the rest of the thing, feeling sick, and ok. It wasn't a 1:1 comparison. Not an exact replica. For one thing, Grace's story had a happier ending than theirs had: declarations of love scrambled with semi-appropriate pop culture references, the 'Pala riding off into the sunrise with lesser Motley Cruë blasting, their fingers entwined on the front seat and no, Dean did not get misty, reading that.

It was cold, that was all. The room was cold. Made his nose run.

Then he had an inkling, a sick sudden hunch, that maybe, if he kept reading—maybe, if he kept looking—he'd find other stories that seemed familiar. That were a little more true to life than the others.

And he did.

First he searched for "cupcakes" and "Beeville."

Found "Open Up the Door." 

Grace's version ended with bloodplay, with Sam slicing their palms with a knife and jamming their flesh together, tears on his face, hoarsely swearing that he'd _never_ leave Dean. Never again. Degenerated into fluffy kissing and cooing and, ok. 

Maybe he should bookmark that one.

Searched for "Impala" and "sex" and came back with like a dozen possibilities that he didn't have time to get through. He put that one in the "maybe" column and moved on.

Searched for "barn" and "Lincoln" and "rain."

Found "Sail Across the Stormy Sea," in which that night in the barn, the sex between them, was so transformative, in Grace’s version, so revelatory, that they gave up the hunting life and moved to Maine, to a motel on the beach that Sam bought and Dean fixed up and together they christened every room before they opened, tested the mattresses and fucked in the showers and made out on the reception desk before they finally turned on the "Vacancy" sign. 

And okay. He officially felt cheated on that one.

He sat back, closed his eyes.

Because this thing, whatever it was between he and Sam? It was _real_ , damn it. Ok, weird and amnesia-inducing and probably illegal in 48 out of 50 states, but real. Meaningful. Important. And kind of wonderful, for him.

But how to reconcile that with what was on the screen, the words solid and certain on the page, way more concrete than any of their memories, than anything that they'd written down?

And this was exactly the kind of thing that Sam would be able to see, would be able to figure out in like a second, but Dean took Chuck's warning seriously, for some reason: not to involve Sammy. 

He'd have to figure this out on his own. And that was kind of ok with him.

Sam kept bringing it up every couple a days, kept swinging the conversation around to it in ways he thought were clever but for anyone who knew him—for Dean—they were transparent as fuck. And annoying.

Like the week before, when somebody had played “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight” on the jukebox and Sam had leaned over the table, brow wrinkled, and said “Did I suck you off once or twice in Lincoln?", sending Dean’s milkshake up and out of his nose, all over his very excellent cheese fries, ruining both his dinner and his opportunity to karaoke the hell out of Cutting Crew because Sam hated that song, always changed the station when it came on the radio in the car and goddamn it, Dean hadn’t remembered until Sam had asked but the answer was twice. Oh, fuck, it was twice.

So Sam kept poking and Dean kept not answering, kept reading Grace’s stories instead. Hoping to find an answer on his own. 

So. Ok. He could do this.

He sat up a little straighter. Closed the web page. Wiped the history. Got up and started pacing. Starting thinking.

He'd heard of haunted books before: everyday objects imbued with the spirit of a past owner. Not that uncommon.

But he'd never heard of those books coming to life. More like, they were tied to the spirit somehow, became a locus for their energy. Followed the book or the sofa or the knick-knack around, trailing along after each new owner, sometimes causing trouble, sometimes just popping up every now and then to jerk somebody's chain.

He grabbed a beer, kept moving as he drank.

Kind of depended on the relationship between the person and the thing. How they were tied to it, associated with it, and why.

Dean blinked.

But virtual text, random crap posted on the internet? There was no materiality there, no physical object to which the spirit could become tethered.

Hell, he'd seen _Ghost in the Shell_ and _The Ring_ and laughed his ass off at both, but come on. 

There were no ghosts on the internet. Much less ones that could travel through text that you didn't even know was there and make you do things, make you be their spirit-y monkeys or whatever.

Make you sleep with your brother.

But.

He clacked his tongue against his teeth, hit the door with his hip and turned back, counting his steps across the room.

What if—?

What if the text was haunted? Like, not the letters on the page, the code on the internet or whatever, but the stories themselves? The scenarios? The scripts?

Hmm.

More beer. More pacing.

What if, every time they got close, every time their real lives bumped up against one of Grace’s stories, one of the scripts she’d written for (fictional) them, they were pulled into it, like a virtual black hole or something? 

Compelled to act the stories out, to a point.

To the point at which their actual circumstances diverged from the text.

And, at that point, for some reason: they snapped out of it, gave up the ghost and got to be themselves again, with only sketchy memories of what had happened. Of what they’d done.

Huh.

One more. This was a three-beer problem.

It wasn’t much of a theory, but it was something. Gave him something to work with, at least.

He stopped, the bottle halfway to his lips.

Gave him something to test, even. A hypothesis.

And ok, maybe he grinned a little at that. At the thought of conducting an experiment or two.

For science. Well, their brand of science, anyway. 

He stood there for a moment, beaming into his beer, because, oh yeah. He knew which “experiment” he wanted to try first. Which story of Grace’s he wanted to run their real lives into. What results he was hoping to replicate.

Now.

He looked around for the phone book.

Where was the nearest mini-golf course?


	6. Chapter 6

Dean insisted on using a purple ball.

Which was weird.

He turned the green eyes up to 11 and asked the girl behind the counter to please check and see if there was one back there that was purple. With his name on it.

Sam leaned against the pinball machine and pretended they weren’t together.

“Really, Dean?” he said when they finally got outside. “Purple?”

“What do you care?” Dean shot back. “At this point, what do I have to lose?” He squinted up into Sam’s face, his eyes hooded by the streetlights. “When’s the last time you didn’t kick my ass at mini-golf, man? 1998?”

Sam dropped his (orange) ball on the first green. Trapped it under his shoe.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “You’ve got no patience. That’s your problem. You get frustrated way too easy.”

“Hmmm,” Dean rumbled. “We can’t all be heartless robots, Sam.”

Sam rolled his eyes. Positioned his club.

“It’ll be good for you,” he said. “Eating salads for a week. I’m gonna enjoy watching that.”

“No way,” Dean scoffed. “Your luck has to turn sometime.”

“Not luck,” Sam grinned. “Skill. Pure talent.”

Dean grinned right back. “Whatever,” he said, reaching up and ruffling Sam’s hair. “Enjoy the locks while they last, Sammy.”

“Right,” Sam said, bending over the club. “Like that’s gonna happen.”

But things started to go sideways almost immediately: on the third hole, the one with the water traps and the windmill.

Usually, Sam loved the windmill. It was like shooting a bullet at a moving target. Ok, a small round bullet that had a tendency to bounce, but still. Usually, he could get Zen and knock that fucker right through. And the best part was always basking in Dean’s stream of curses, first at Sam, then at himself as he invariably hit the blades two or three times before winging the ball into the next hole or the parking lot or into some elderly dude playing behind them.

But this time, the damn purple ball sailed right through, stayed straight and true and ended up less than a foot from the cup.

Sam was incredulous.

But what was weirder was the way Dean reacted: this quiet, pleased smile. No fist-pumping, no Sam-taunting, no handsprings. He just strolled back behind the windmill and called: “Come on, Sam. You can do it. You got this.”

Sam felt his face twist. “What?” he barked.

Dean peeked out from behind the windmill, beatific grin still in place.

“I said, you got this, Sammy. No problem.”

Sam shook his head, muttering.

“Whatever, dude. Whatever.”

Suddenly, a flock of birds started chattering behind him and he spun, startled, and ok, no. It was just a gaggle of teenage girls, decked out in neon and shorts and impractical-looking shoes.

“Uh, hi,” he said stupidly, sending them into a giggly flutter and oh, boy. Awesome.

And of course, he missed. Four times. Dean shouting encouragement after every thunk, after every time the ball smacked a blade and flew back to Sam’s feet.

“Five stroke minimum!” one of the girls said.

“Not with me,” another one trilled, setting off another flutter bomb.

Sam picked up his ball and stomped around to the back of the hole, scowling. Dean patted his arm and tapped in for a two. Put Sam down for a five.

And it was all downhill from there.

Because Dean kept being supportive. Helpful, even, pointing out dips in the tattered green, suggesting possible approaches.

And he ignored the girls behind them. Totally. Even though they were, ok, maybe a little young, but still. Normally, Dean would be charming up a storm, waggling his eyelashes and lowering his voice and finding excuses to bend over. And they were really persistent, this bunch. And loud. And, uh, open in their affections.

But still, Dean kept his eyes on Sam, his focus on the game, on actually keeping score.

It freaked Sam the fuck out. And it showed.

"Hey," Dean said, knocking his elbow. "It's ok, man. You've got plenty of time left to rally."

"Shut up," Sam growled.

But Dean was right, because on the back nine, he started to get his Tiger back: birdie, birdie, par. Pulled within three shots. Then, on the 14th hole, he knocked it straight across the log bridge and watched the ball dip right down into the hole.

He did a little fist pump. May have shouted "Yes!" a little louder than necessary. Made the girls behind them snicker. He just grinned and happily wrote "1" on the scorecard.

But then, Dean slapped him on the back and said, “Good job, Sammy!” instead of flipping out, cussing the golf gods or whatever, and Sam felt his Tiger dance away, his Zen zip right out of his head, because they had a wager riding on this game and that usually brought the worst out in Dean, the most petulant, twelve-year old boy behavior, and that was so much easier for Sam to deal with than whatever _this_ was, this weird supportive brotherly crap.

Even when he added up the scores, when he told Dean that he’d just beaten Sam by nine strokes--some kind of new, horrible record, Dean had just smiled. Slapped him on the back and said: "Ok. Let’s go home."

In the car, Dean seemed more like himself. Played “We Are The Champions” three times, his voice getting louder and louder, egging Sam on to sing along.

Which he did, eventually. Grinned over at Dean in the dark and relaxed, a little.

Because he forgot about the bet.

When they got back to the room, though, Dean went straight for the bathroom, still howling Queen and beaming, and then, oh yeah. Right.

His hair.

Sam stomped around the room, scowling, kicking himself for his hubris. His utter certainty that there was no way—no freaking way!—that he could lose.

Damn it. He hated losing. Especially to Dean, who treated every minor victory like the freaking Battle of Gettysburg, a triumph that saved the nation, made the world safe for democracy, and gave him permission to ride Sam's ass about it for weeks.

Something in his chest stirred. 

Ok, maybe that wasn't the best way to put it, right then.

He sighed, pulled the chair out away from the desk. 

But they weren't talking about that. At least, Dean didn't want to. Captain Everything's-Awesome-Even-With-The-Coming-Apocalypse had shut him down cold the last few times he’d tried to bring it up, tried to get Dean to see that yes, sleeping with your brother out of the blue and then having almost no memory of it was, in fact, kind of a big fucking deal.

But no. The Captain did not want to discuss it, and Sam was tired of pushing.

Besides, it had been a couple of weeks since the last time.

And they were aware, now, of what was happening. To a point. So they could probably head it off at the pass.

Yeah. They'd totally be able to see the next one coming.

Um.

He slid out of his coat and dropped heavy into the chair.

Damn it.

Dean stormed out of the bathroom, brandishing the scissors like they were Excalibur or something.

"The time has come, young Skywalker,” he boomed.

Sam rolled his eyes. 

“Dude. Come on. Don't be such a dick.”

Dean dropped his pose, pouting. 

“I'm not a dick. You're just a crappy loser.”

Sam let his breath out in a huff and sat back. Crossed his arms. 

“Can we just get this over with?”

Dean marched over and snapped on the desk lamp, turned the shade so the bulb shot over into Sam's hair.

“Ok,” he said. “Ok, ok. Now, be still, Sammy. You remember what happened last time we did this.”

“That wasn't my fault!” Sam barked, watching Dean circle him. “I was completely freaking still. You just went all slasher movie on me, man.”

Dean chuckled.

“Whatever,” he scoffed. “You jerked your head. Not my fault the scissors slipped.”

Sam felt Dean's fingers gliding through his hair. Tugging. Catching. Holding.

“Now,” Dean said again. “Be still.”

The scissors snapped and Sam winced, had this mental image of himself suddenly and completely bald.

“Come on, Sammy,” Dean said, patting his head. “Relax. I'm not gonna hurt you.”

Sam grumbled.

Dean got him again: tug, catch, hold. Snip. And again.

This had once been normal for them, part of their routine. Before he’d left, before Stanford, Dean had cut his hair every couple of weeks. On Saturday mornings, in front of _The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo_ or _The Snorks_ or whatever. Newspaper tucked around the chair or on the bed, Dean imploring him not to move, threatening to buzz it all off if Sam wouldn’t stay the fuck still.

Dean was never any good at it, not really, but it hadn’t mattered. Not that much. Sam was resigned to his hair being basically possessed: a tangled, moody mess.

And, anyway. Girls seemed to like it. And it wasn't like it was a bad thing, even when he got older, having all of Dean’s attention focused on him every once and a while.

Having his hands on Sam, like that.

And when he’d come back, they’d kind of fallen right back to it, Dean cutting his hair. Hell, it was cheaper than a barber. And almost made up for Dean’s financial dependence on hair gel.

But a year or so ago, they’d been watching some stupid basketball game and Dean had gotten distracted (Sam asserted) or Sam had gotten twitchy (Dean maintained) and a hefty chunk of curl had been sacrificed, had landed on the newspaper with a thud.

10 minutes of pushing, shoving, and projectile-hurling later, Sam had made a furious vow never to let Dean anywhere near him with scissors again.

Ever.

And now this.

Dean’s hand dove into Sam's hair, stroking, and Sam shivered.

For some reason.

“Sammy,” Dean said. Warning.

Sam gritted his teeth and willed himself not to move.

But then Dean yanked, got a handful of hair and just fucking pulled. Sam's whole body jerked, leapt up off the chair in response, even as he sensed the scissors moving behind his head, the whisper of the blades over his ear.

“Dude,” Dean huffed. “You are making this like ten times harder than it needs to be. Stop bucking like a damn bronco!”

Sam opened his eyes, glaring.

"Maybe if you weren’t physically assaulting my head rather than just _cutting my fucking hair_ , we wouldn’t be having this problem.”

Dean laughed.

“Oh, am I being too rough for you, honey? You want me to go easy on you? On your precious locks?”

“Shut up,” Sam snarled. Willing himself not to pout.

“Look,” Dean said, tilting his head. “It’s your bangs, man. They are seriously out of control, and it’s hard for me to get a grip on them.” He made a face, the one he used when he was pretending to think about something. “Hmm.”

He reached out and pulled Sam’s hair down, over his eyes. Brushed his knuckles over Sam’s forehead in the process. Left them there.

Sam sighed. Heard this tone start to sound in his head, deep and fuzzy and warm.

“Hmm,” Dean said again, his voice rough in his chest. “Sammy. Why don’t you let me tie you to this chair? Keep your from rocking all over the place. Keep me from making a mistake we’ll both regret.”

And that was ridiculous. Sam recognized it, at some level, as a completely preposterous assertion.

But his mouth said: “Oookay,” in this slow and runny way that made him smile, for some reason.

He sat back, still grinning. Let his arms fall from his lap. Narrowed his eyes and watched Dean through his bangs, watched him dig in Sam’s bag and slide back, fall behind him. 

Felt Dean’s fingers curls around his wrists. Felt him tug and tie and tighten. Pull.

Sam felt his breath catch. His heart kick up into a higher gear. That tone in his head get louder. Lower.

Dean let go of his hands and curved back around the chair.

“Now,” he said, and something inside Sam went a little marshmallow, at the sound of that voice. “Be still.”

He grabbed the scissors from the desk and stepped into Sam, swung his leg up and straddled Sam's thighs. Parked himself in Sam’s lap.

Sam made a strangled noise and pushed himself up, trying to catch as much of Dean’s body as he could with his own.

For some reason.

Dean chuckled. Reached out and stroked his hair. Slid a few strands through his fingers, balanced the scissors between them, just in front of Sam’s eyes.

Tug. Catch. Hold. Snip.

Tug. Catch. Hold. Snip.

Dean’s hips moving against his with every snap of the scissors. His breath hot and fast against Sam’s face.

God. Oh god.

He struggled against the silky bind, tried to yank his wrists apart.

“Your tie,” Dean hummed, reaching around with his free hand, sliding it over Sam’s arm and down. Pulling on the knot, a little. “It’s your tie, Sam.”

“Oh,” Sam said, bowing his chest forward as Dean’s came closer. Straining to reach him, maybe.

“Yeah,” Dean said, and Sam heard the scissors hit the floor, felt Dean’s other hand fall down behind his back, meet up with the first, and now they were mouth to mouth, or would be, if Sam’s stupid bangs weren’t in the damn way.

Dean groaned and shoved his hips forward, drove them into Sam’s belly until Sam could feel him straining, his cock vibrating between them. Until Sam was moaning right back, his hair fluttering over his open mouth, until Dean’s hand flew up, yanked it out of the way, and barreled his way in, his tongue his teeth coming home.

At least, that’s what it felt like to Sam.

Which didn’t make a damn bit of sense.

Because, come on. Dean had never kissed him before.

Had sure as hell never knocked his head back and licked down into his mouth, diving and sucking and goddamn, Dean was good at this, so eager and slick and demanding.

He felt another hand spear into his hair, felt Dean climbing up his body, practically, trying to get at him, grinning like a madman.

He felt devoured.

He felt awesome.

He felt—really fucking frustrated that he couldn’t touch Dean back, couldn’t get his hands on his chest or his thighs or his cock which was obviously ready so ready to be touched, to have him wrap his fingers around it and tug, yank it free and push his thumb over the head until Dean was—

He rocked the chair, hissing, tried to pull his hands free, but Dean just laughed, breathless. Pushed him back down.

“No, baby,” he purred into Sam’s mouth. “No use. You’re not going anywhere until I tell you to.”

Sam keened, long and sweet, and Dean smothered it, lapped it up with his tongue.

Then he raised his head. Dropped Sam’s. “Sammy,” he said. “Look at me.”

Sam opened his eyes, saw Dean’s shining, his mouth curling.

Then Dean leaned back. Let his hands drop over his thighs, his eyes locked on Sam’s face.

Sam bit his lip. Let his eyes fall. Let them follow Dean’s fingers as they worked in, shifted down into his crotch.

Slid up, traced the outline of his cock. Stopped.

Dean moaned, and Sam’s eyes snapped up, watch Dean’s mouth twist and open, his tongue falling out over his lips.

His gaze still fixed on Sam’s face.

Sam jerked, yanking as hard as he could, his hands aching with the need to touch Dean, to slam him back into the bed, the wall, the floor and get his mouth on that cock that was right the fuck there, so fucking close to him that he could almost—

Dean’s fingers on his face. Falling over his jaw. Tracing his lips.

Dean’s eyes were arrows. Pinning Sam down. Holding him in place.

“Shhhh,” Dean said. “Just watch me, Sammy.”

He took his hand back, brought it to his waist. Undid his belt.

Opened his fly.

Pulled out his cock. Curled his fingers around the shaft, shuddering at his own touch.

And Sam realized he was holding his breath, was biting his lip, was shaking like crazy. Watching.

Dean's face, lit up by the lamp. He was red to the tips of his ears, and all that flush just made his eyes brighter, his mouth softer.

Dean whimpered, his fist pumping, and Sam's cock leapt in sympathy, in envy, and tried its best to hurl itself out of his jeans and into Dean's hand, the free one, the one that he had planted on Sam's thigh, the one he was using to hold all his weight as his body rippled into his fist, following the slide of his fingers up and over his cock.

And god, his eyes. Never left Sam's.

Sam saw himself, there. His mouth hanging open, his goddamn hair whipping around his face as his body instinctively drove itself up. Towards Dean.

The desire shimmering in Dean's eyes, he knew, mirrored his own, reflected it back and threatened to burn them both down in the process.

Dean took a deep breath that shredded as it left his lips.

"Yeah, Sammy," he managed. "Look. Look at me." He slowed his hand a little, let his cock hang heavy in his palm, the head almost as flushed as his face.

Made Sam's mouth hurt, seeing that. Made him feel so fucking empty, the absence hanging between his teeth, digging its way into his tongue.

"Dean," he slurred. "Untie me. Please. Need to touch you, I--" his voice kicked up into a whine, tight and torn. "Want to, Dean, please. Let me--"

Dean's face shifted, his hand kicking back up into high gear.

"No," he panted. "Not yet. Lemme show you what I want. What you're gonna do for me when I let you touch me. When l let you put your hands on my cock."

He let go of Sam's thigh and pitched back, his balance precarious, his face his body his voice beautiful, god, so beautiful that it stung Sam, a little. Shot a thousand stingers deep into his heart.

"Fuck," Dean sighed. "Fuck, Sam. Do you see? You see what I want you to do to me?"

Sam looked down, helpless. Watched Dean's fingers shift up and back, a steady quick rhythm, his thumb just catching the head every time. Below, he saw Dean's other hand tracing his balls, teasing, just barely stroking, a counterbalance that was making Dean crazy, making his body flow up in this perfect arch, a mirror image of his cock, making his voice float up out of his chest, that lazy growl stripped down to something high and sweet.

"Sammy," he breathed, "Sammy. See? Do you see?"

Sam choked, his cock telling him, warning him, that he was gonna break, that he couldn't stay whole if he watched Dean go to pieces right in front of him, that he was just gonna--

"Come," Dean cried, throwing his head back, tugging. Catching. Holding. "Gonna come, Sam, god, gonna come all over you, baby, I'm--"

He trembled and poured himself out, come flying over his fingers, on his shirt, and, as his hand slipped, down over Sam's thighs and his crotch and damn if Sam's poor trapped cock didn't just give the fuck up and erupt, his mouth going sideways and Dean's name shooting out again and again until Dean leaned into him, kissed him, quieted him with his tongue. His hands sliding messy and wet over Sam's face.

"Love you," Sam whispered, after a while.

He felt Dean's lips curve under his ear. "I know, baby," he said. "I know."


	7. Chapter 7

The next morning, Dean went out for coffee without being asked.

Of his own free will, even.

When Sam woke up, he was gone, a note on the nightstand and no mention of the night before. 

Which was fine with Sam.

But it took Dean for-freaking-ever, it seemed like, to make it back.

When he finally showed, Sam was clean and clothed and leaning towards antsy, rubbing his wrists and trying not to look at the damn chair.

Trying not to look too closely at what he was thinking.

At what he remembered. 

Not everything, not all of it, but more than he ever had before. This one was a little clearer, a little more real, and maybe it was just the ache in his hands or the ragged bangs in the mirror, but last night seemed—different, somehow.

And that couldn’t be a good thing. 

Could it?

He heard the key in the lock and turned, watched Dean bob through the doorway, wrangling a huge white cup like it might be radioactive.

"Here," Dean said, holding it out. "For you, Sammy."

Sam took it, grateful. Got a big whiff of that beautiful sugar bomb.

"Thanks," he said. "But where's yours?"

Dean's eyes darted around. "Um," he managed. Fumbling with his coat. "Drank it on the way back. Needed the kickstart."

"Uh huh," Sam said, grinning, because, oh yeah. This was totally a peace offering, a Starbucks-endorsed olive branch to make up for Dean's dickishness the night before. Before the sex, anyway, before he'd straddled Sam in the chair and opened his fly and—

He swallowed.

Ok, no need to go there.

He tipped the cup back and got one good taste, felt the heat curl down his throat, before Dean pitched forward out of nowhere, spazzed the fuck out like he’d been shot and handed Sam a nice hot latte shower.

"Fuck!" Sam shrieked, the sweetness burning down his shirt and flashing into his skin. "Goddamn it, Dean!"

Dean just stood there, blinking, giving him the anime eyes and not doing a damn thing to help. Appraising.

Sam threw the empty cup at Dean's head and yanked off his flannel, peeled his t-shirt away. Threw them at his brother, too.

But still, Dean didn't move. Just stared.

The sticky and the hot hit Sam all at once and he shuddered, feeling like a glazed donut right out of the fryer.

He stared down at himself: his chest, red as hell, his jeans covered in caffeine. Hell, there was even whipped cream on his boots. And sprinkles.

"Sam," Dean said, sounding like he was on another planet or something. "You hurt? You get burned?"

Sam scowled. "You better hope not," he said. "If so, I'm making you change the dressings."

"Huh," Dean said. He waded through the detritus of Sam’s morning ablutions. Stopped right under Sam's nose.

Put his palm flat onto Sam's chest. Pushed into the red and left a white brand behind.

Sam's breath kicked out of his chest. His ears started to ring in this way that seemed sort of familiar, but he couldn’t quite figure out—

"No," Dean said, eyes fixed on his hand. On Sam. "No burns here."

His fingers slid lower, brushed over Sam's ribs.

"No," he said again. Steady. "None here, either."

He looked up, those green eyes like beacons. "But man, you're sticky as hell."

"Um," Sam said, his eyes flickering, his eyelids trying to protect him, cut him off from Dean just long enough to remember why he felt so funny, why he was—

"Maybe you should take a shower," Dean said, his lips curling.

"Well," Sam started—

"Or I could lick it off," Dean murmured, a second before his tongue flicked over Sam's skin. Swept up his breastbone. Buried itself in the hollow of Sam's throat.

Sam’s head snapped back like he’d been slapped, his whole body focused on the warm wet of Dean’s mouth. "God," he panted, his head ringing like a fucking bell tower. "Oh, god, Dean."

He slid his hands into the back pockets of Dean's jeans and pulled their hips together. Instinct. Something he’d wanted to do a thousand times, something he’d never let himself think that he would, that he could. 

He flexed his hands, grabbed Dean's ass, growling, curled his fingers around—

A piece of paper?

He lifted it out of Dean's pocket, frowning, a weird dissonant note sounding in his head. A warning.

Held the paper up, got a glimpse of Dean's chicken scrawl, something about a double-something something with an extra pump of—

"Wait, what?" Sam managed, pulling the note up next to Dean's head. "Dean. What's this?"

  For a split second, Dean hesitated, his mouth still. 

And the dissonance in Sam's head got louder, more insistent, and damn, he _knew_ it, he knew there was something weird going on here—! 

But then Dean flicked his lips over a nipple and sucked, dug his teeth in and hung on for dear life, and Sam moaned, dropped the stupid paper, stopped asking questions, let himself be driven into the nearest bed. Let Dean cover him in long, slow kisses until they found an even better way to make their bodies stick together.

**

But the questions? They came right the fuck back, after.

"What was that?" Sam demanded.

Dean sat up a little, his eyes still heavy.

"What?"

Sam flipped his hand over the bed, took in the scene with one long sweep.

"This!" he barked. "Us having sex!"

One of Dean's eyes remembered how to open.

"It's us having sex, Sam," he deadpanned. "You always were the smart one."

"No, but," Sam huffed. "We just had sex last night!"

Dean's other lid lifted.

"And?"

"And, that's never happened before, has it? Us sleeping together in such rapid succession?"

Dean rolled his eyes. "First of all, we're not 'sleeping together,' Sam, because neither of us is a fifty-year old woman and this isn't a romance novel, ok? Second, 'rapid succession'? Are you saying my cock is like a submachine gun? 'Cause if so, that's an idea I could get behind." He waggled his eyebrows.

Sam gaped at him, incredulous.

"You think this is funny? Damn it, Dean! This is serious!"

"Really?" Dean sighed, flopping back on the pillow. "How’s that, exactly?"

Sam glared down at him.

"You need me to spell it out again, asshole? Fine. This? What we're doing? It's incest. It's illegal! It's—" And he wanted to say "wrong," it was right there on the tip of his tongue, but something stopped him, held him back.

It was like, part of him didn't totally believe that. Not really. And he'd always been a terrible liar.

Well. Mostly.

Dean spread his hands. "Sam, you're not making any sense."

"No! Listen to me. This is weird. Us forgetting that we've slept togeth—that we've fucked. That's strange. Even for us!"

“Ok, I'll give you that," Dean said, stretching. "But what do you suggest we do about it, exactly?" He looked up, suddenly serious. Which was odd. "Do you still hate this? That this is happening? Do you feel like I'm forcing you to—?"

"No," Sam sighed. "No. That's just it. It's different, now. It's like—" He bit his lip, trying to get the words right. "It's like, when we're in the moment, or whatever, it's exactly what I want. You're exactly what I want."

He dipped his head, felt himself flush. Watched the words sink into Dean's face. Soft. The swagger pushed into the background.

"Oh," Dean said. "Yeah. I—It's kinda like that for me, too. Like one second, we're just us, and the next, all I can think about is—"

Sam felt the unspoken brush his cheek. Felt it settle inside him somewhere for safekeeping.

"And every time we do this, we kiss or fuck or whatever, it feels like it's the first time it's ever happened," Dean said, the words tumbling out in a rush. "And that makes it—" He wiped a hand over his mouth and blushed, which, seriously? Sam could count on one hand the number of times that had ever happened.

"Yeah," Sam said, blinking. "It does. Feel like the first time."

"Huh," Dean said.

"Huh," Sam said.

They lay there for a long moment. Thinking.

"So," Sam said, finally. "Do this mean we can remember more, now? Because last night and today—it's not fading for me like it usually does." And all the other times, he realized, the ones that were suddenly flooding his brain, throwing buckets of memories of Dean—his hands, his laugh, his mouth—overboard and straight down into his heart.

Dean stared at him, that weird clinical intensity from before. "Really?"

"Yeah. You too?"

Dean's mouth twisted. He tried to mask it in a yawn but, yeah, he looked like he was biting his tongue. Holding something back. 

But what he said was:

"Something like that.”

He threw back the sheets and stood up. "Shower. Then breakfast?"

"Yeah," Sam said, suddenly hungry as hell. "But don't use all the hot water."

"Pfft," Dean scoffed. "I'm the oldest, bitch. Hot water's my birthright."

Sam rolled his eyes.

He heard the shower start and sat up, stretching, grimacing at his fine candy coating. Ew. No point in putting clothes on if they were just gonna get slimed.

He sighed, nudged his boots with his toe and prayed the whipped cream hadn't made it inside.

Then something caught his eye.

Something crumpled and white.

Wait a minute. The paper. The thing from Dean's pocket.

He plucked it from the floor and unfolded it, pressed the edges into the bed and read:

> _"Venti double *soy* extra whip caramel macchiato with one pump hazelnut and chocolate sprinkles (with room)."_

He frowned.

What the what now? Dean would sure as hell never drink something like this. Not if he had to be the one to order it, anyway. Though he wasn't above sneaking some of Sam's if he thought no one would—

Oh.

Oh, hey.

Sam sat back, frowning.

But he'd never ordered anything like this. Ok, maybe _like_ it, but not anything this OCD-specific and sugar-filled. Hell, he didn’t even like hazelnut.

Where had Dean gotten this? And why the fuck had he written it down?

He heard the shower stutter, stop. Dove for his duffel and tucked the paper inside. Didn’t mention it to Dean. 

Spent the morning puzzling, turning the words over in his head and trying not to get diabetes from all that sweet.

**

They were headed north, towards Michigan, towards a confluence of weird shit that might just be everyday demons looking for a fight. Or it might be another seal about to break. Either way: nothing good.

Sam was antsy as hell, his hands itching for ten minutes with his laptop, time to dig out that weird quote and find out what it was from.

It was probably nothing. Maybe it wasn’t even a quote. But his Spidey sense said otherwise.

He thought about just asking Dean about it, like a normal person, but he kept seeing his brother’s face from that morning, staring at Sam like he was a lab experiment or something, waiting for him to Gremlin out under that slick coffee sheen.

So no. Better to dig first and ask questions later.

And, anyway, whatever confessional air had hung between them that morning was gone, washed away in the wind and the road and the sense of normal that always filled the car, the one place, the one space that never changed.

Dean was in a hurry—Cas had been insistent, apparently, insistent but vague. Shocker.—and they didn’t stop anywhere big enough to have wifi until dinner, until it was almost dark.

Even then, Dean would not leave Sam alone. He seemed fucking determined to laze at the table all evening, even with the cute brunette making eyes at him from behind the register. Like, not just eyes, but practically her entire face. And normally, Dean would have leapt up the second his fries were gone, the moment he needed a refill.

But tonight he was clueless, dawdling over his burger and yammering on about the funny noise the Impala was making under the driver’s side dash.

It sounded to Sam like Dean was desperate for things to be normal between them. Which they most definitely were not. And maybe Dean had realized that, too.

Finally, Sam kicked him under the table and shifted his eyes towards the counter.

“Dude,” he interrupted. “Are you waiting for a parade? An engraved invitation?”

Dean stopped mid-stream and followed Sam’s gaze. Turned back, smirking, and winked.

“Well why didn’t you say so?” he said, sidling out of the booth. “Ok, Sam. Prepare to bask in the master at work.”

Sam groaned like he was supposed to, put on a flash of exasperation. Got a toothy grin in return. 

The second Dean’s back was turned, he whipped the laptop onto the table and dug the paper out of his coat pocket.

Typed as fast as he could, the words getting jumbled on the screen.

But it was enough for the Web to cough something up in response. Something pretty fucking specific, actually.

 _Undisclosed Desires_ , the banner said.

“Spent My Time So Foolishly,” the page said.

“What the hell?” Sam said.

He read as fast as he could, feeling the steam rise in his chest. 

Because, come on. This couldn’t be real, could it?

Some of the details were off, sure: they were in Tennessee, not Arizona. And they hadn’t been out fighting a werewolf the night before. And Sam sure as hell hadn’t been crying about that in the shower, didn’t need a little pick-me-up from Dean.

But.

The writer—one of Chuck’s fans?—had been pretty fucking particular about what Dean had ordered, what he was sure Sam would want. What would make him happy.

> _"Venti double *soy* extra whip caramel macchiato with one pump hazelnut and chocolate sprinkles (with room)."_

Yeah. Dean had even copied down the underlining. And the stars.

Oh, god.

And then there was the sex. Dean’s mouth on his body, sweeping sugar under his tongue. 

> _"Or I could lick it off," Dean murmured, a second before his tongue flicked over Sam's skin._

His stomach turned over.

He closed his eyes, tried to block it all out for a second. The possibility. What in the hell this could mean. But his brain ran with it, kept right on cycling through like an anxious hamster in a wheel.

His fingers found the keys. 

He didn’t want to know. He had a terrible feeling that he already knew. 

Enough.

But he couldn’t help it. It was an instinct, a compulsion. A forced habit of a lifetime.

He had to know.

He peeked over at Dean, who was flashing his smile and leaning over the counter, his charm like a blast of AC that reached back to the booth. The girl was winking, a sly smile on her face, her fingers resting right next to Dean’s.

Great.

So he searched the site. Tried not to stare at the banner, at the outline of the Impala and that big, black starry sky, just like the one that hung outside the diner’s window. 

Searched for “cupcakes” and “motel.”

Found "Open Up the Door."

This version ended with bloodplay, with him slicing their palms with a knife and jamming their flesh together, tears on his face, hoarsely swearing that he'd never leave Dean. Never again. Degenerated into fluffy kissing and cooing.

Ok. So not an exact match.

Searched for "Impala" and "sex" and came back with like a dozen possibilities that he didn't have time to get through. He dropped it, impatient, and moved on.

Searched for "barn" and "thunderstorm."

Found "Sail Across the Stormy Sea," in which that night in the barn, the one back in Nebraska, was so transformative, so fucking revelatory, that they gave up the hunting life and moved to Maine, to a motel on the beach that Sam bought and Dean fixed up and together they christened every room before they opened, tested the mattresses and fucked in the showers and made out on the reception desk before they finally turned on the "Vacancy" sign.

Really? Maine? Like, the center of Stephen King country? Come on. They’d be smart enough to avoid a place like that, with all that supernatural energy practically dug into the soil and was he really trying to reason with fan fic? With fan fic that was apparently dictating his life?!

Jesus.

He took a deep breath. 

Searched for “mini putt” and “purple ball.” 

It was called “I Can’t Help Myself.”

Sam skimmed it, one eye on Dean, one ear cocked for his fake trying-to-get-laid laugh. 

The story was close. Really fucking close.

Hell, sub out Sam’s tie for Dean’s and the two were practically twins.

But what caught his eye, what made him sick, was the last line. The last two. 

> _"Love you," Sam whispered, after a while._
> 
> _He felt Dean's lips curve under his ear. "I know, baby," he said. "I know."_

He slammed the laptop shut, so hard his coffee tipped over, and ok, he wasn’t gonna go through that shit again. He leapt up and headed for the door, dragging the laptop behind.

“I’ll be in the car,” he snarled, seeing Dean’s head spin, his surprise.

He resisted the urge to keep walking, to just march the fuck out of town and call Ruby, get as far away from Dean as he could.

Fight the war his own way.

But no.

No.

He had to give Dean a chance to explain. Because maybe there was a really awesome explanation, an Occam’s Razor of a solution that just hadn’t occurred to him because he was so mad he couldn’t see straight, so pissed it felt like his bones were gonna leap out of his skin.

Yeah. Of course there was.

Had to be.

**

He managed to keep it together in the car for the first hundred miles or so.

Until they were way out of town, until the lights faded and the stars lit up around them like some nature documentary. There was no moon, but the stars were so bright it didn’t matter. Felt like the car was wrapped in Christmas lights, practically.

Which made it harder to ignore Dean, harder not to see his face as he kept checking on Sam, kept doing these little scope-outs that he thought were so clever but were really as obvious as fuck.

And Sam was angry, that fury in his chest barely contained, squeezing his heart in a vise. He tried to keep his face calm, tried not to grimace in the dark but god, it was hard not to punch Dean and yell and shake him until he started talking, started explaining what the hell he was doing, exactly. What the hell was going on.

But he didn’t trust himself to talk, not yet, so he sat there and stewed as they got farther from town and deeper into the night.

Dean was in one of his drive-the-fuck-all-night moods, kinda bouncy and wired. The kind where he’d usually be singing, or lip synching like crazy, or dragging Sam into some stupid _Tango & Cash_ quote-off. But he seemed to sense something was up because he kept the radio at a reasonable level, kept his trap shut for most of the night.

It was quiet, in the car. Unsettled. Right on the edge of a storm.

About two, Dean announced that he needed to piss and pulled off into a field, just scrub and grass and more than a little dirt.

Sam climbed out and leaned against the trunk. Trying to breathe. Exhaustion and anger duking it out in his head and making him punchy.

Made him itch for a fight.

Dean wandered back, tugging at his zipper and yawning.

“Hey,” he said. “Maybe we should stop for awhile. I think I need to be upright for a minute. Stretch my legs.”

“Whatever,” Sam spat. “Fine.”

Dean stopped short.

“Hey,” he said again. Pissed. “What the hell’s your problem?”

Sam had him by the collar before he realized it, his fingers dug down into Dean’s flesh.

“My problem?” he barked. “Mine? You wanna explain to me what the fuck is going on here?”

Dean’s hand shot up and grabbed Sam’s wrist. Yanked back.

“You mean like you assaulting me?” Dean growled. “Why don’t you explain that to me?”

Sam shook him, snarling.

“The website, Dean. I found the website.”

Dean blanched.

“The—website? I don’t—”

Sam picked him up and banged his back into the trunk, so hard that Sam felt the ricochet in his teeth.

Too hard, part of him realized. But the rest of him didn’t care.

“Ow!” Dean yelled, flailing. “Son-of-a-bitch! What the hell!”

Sam leaned down, put his face right over Dean’s and sneered. Watched Dean recoil like he’d been bit.

“The stories. I read your little stories or whatever. The one’s you’ve been using to hoodoo me, to trick me into fucking you.”

Dean went white.

Sam didn’t stop. He couldn’t. 

Instead, he stepped in, draped his body over Dean’s and pinned him, his hands as good as a stake through the heart.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I know, Dean. I know what you’ve been doing.”

Dean was a rabbit in a snare. Shaking, his eyes pleading for mercy that Sam was pretty fucking sure he didn’t deserve.

“No! No, Sammy, you don’t understand, I was just—”

“Shut up!” Sam shouted.

And kissed him.

It was less a kiss, it seemed like, than an act of aggression. A declaration of war.

He speared his way into Dean’s mouth, dug down as far as he could. Furious.

Dean thrashed under him, fearful, his arms catching Sam in the head, his boots banging into Sam’s hips, stinging. But Sam didn’t let go. Just pushed harder, forced Dean farther down into the metal. Certain.

Dean rocked again, kicked all of his weight up, and made this noise that was almost a howl, a sound that made Sam shiver, made something in him shake way down at the core. 

The air around them shifted. The stars kicked lower, hung fast behind Sam’s eyes, and whatever it was between them unfolded like a deck of cards.

Dean stopped struggling. Opened his mouth, let his body go slack. He pushed himself into Sam’s arms, groaning, sucking frantically on Sam’s tongue.

That’s what it was. What it was like, for Sam.

Frantic.

Like he couldn’t get enough of Dean, fast enough. Like if he didn’t get it now, hell, the clock was running and he might never get another chance.

Face card. Three of hearts. Ace of spades.

The cards kept falling—Dean’s jacket. Sam’s shirt. Dean’s belt. Sam’s boots—one after the other, until Sam was there, he was right there, aching, Dean moaning into his neck and begging, fucking begging him to—

“Glove compartment,” he panted. “Jesus, Sammy, please. Look in the—” 

Sam wrenched himself away and stumbled to the front seat. Ripped the box from a brown paper bag and torn the condom open with his teeth.

Stretched Dean back over the trunk and tried to take his time, at least a little, because he didn’t want to hurt him, anymore than he already had, wanted this to be good for him. For them both.

But Dean pushed back against his fingers, that frantic coming back in waves as Sam tried to stretch him, tried, but Dean was so hot, god, and tight, and he was back to begging, screaming for Sam to fuck him in the dark and who was Sam to say no to that? How could he. To an offer of divinity, like that.

Dean barely let Sam get the condom on before he grabbed Sam’s hips and pulled, his breath coming sweet and fast.

“Bossy,” Sam groaned. “So fucking bossy, Dean.”

Then he found his way in, slow and steady and forever, and nobody said another word.

Dean curled into him, his fingers, his legs, his lips, all turned inward. Towards Sam. 

Sam pushed his palms into the trunk, buried his face in Dean’s hair, and let himself go. His hips working. His cock caught. His heart aching. 

He felt Dean’s fist moving between them, his knuckles sliding over Sam’s stomach as he pumped, the weight the heat of his cock searing into Sam’s skin. 

Burned. He’d be burned for sure, tomorrow.

Then Dean’s whole body tensed, his nails ripping into Sam’s neck, his mouth like a dagger in Sam’s throat. And he came, that splash of slick between them, his lips working over words that didn’t have names.

Sam grabbed his head, tilted it up so he could see Dean’s eyes, shadows in the starlight, as he poured himself in, let it all out, his hips snapping even after his cock was spent, even after they were kissing again, Dean’s mouth whispering over his own.

“Love you,” Dean sighed.

And Sam came crashing back down to earth, got pulled out of heaven and dumped back into the cold, naked and shivering on the side of the road, in the middle of a field of dead grass and rocks. Angry. He was so fucking angry, again.

He jerked himself away and fumbled for his clothes in the dark.

“Sam?” Dean said, his voice from the bottom of a well. “What’s wrong?”

Sam ignored him. Got dressed as fast as he could.

“Sam?” Dean said again. Awake enough to be alarmed. “What is it?”

“You tell me!” Sam shouted, and it was like the last 20 minutes hadn’t happened, a dream that had disappeared as soon as he’d awakened. “Tell me what the fuck is going on. Why is someone on the internet writing shit about us? Shit that’s coming true? Is it another prophet? A witch? A demon? What is it, Dean?”

Dean closed his eyes.

“I don’t know what it is, exactly. That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.” 

Sam just stared at him. 

“It’s—it’s kind of like you said. It’s someone—a fan of Chuck’s—she wrote this stuff about us, about us being together—“

“Fucking each other,” Sam interjected. Bitter.

Dean winced.

“Fucking each other, yeah, and for some reason, it’s coming true. But I think it only happens when we get close to something she wrote, like when the circumstances are similar enough. That’s my theory, anyway.”

“Wait!” Sam said. Fuming. “WAIT. How long have you known about this? Have you been doing this to me on purpose? Used me as your guinea pig without telling me?”

Dean hopped down off the trunk, reaching for him. “No, no, Sam, you don’t understand, it’s not like that, it’s—"

Sam backed away, hissing. “So all of this is just one freaking huge coincidence? Is that what you’re saying? It’s one big clusterfuck that we just happened to get caught in the middle of? Repeatedly? Almost verbatim?”

Dean looked like he was going to throw up.

“Sam, look, you’re taking it all out of context. Chuck told me to—”

“Chuck?!” Sam bellowed. “ _Chuck_ knew about this? What the hell, Dean!”

Dean’s lips moved but nothing came out. 

Sam grabbed his head, tried to keep his brain from leaping to safety. From bludgeoning Dean to death.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said, finally. Quietly. “After all the crap we’ve been through. Why’d you keep this from me? Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” 

_Careful_ , his blood said. _Careful, Sam_. 

Right. 

Dean looked up, his face gaunt, his eyes wide. “I should have,” he croaked. “I didn’t mean too hurt you, honest, I just—” He swallowed. “I—it made me happy, Sam. I—for the first time since I got back, I felt safe, when we were—” 

He choked, his grief caught right out there in the open. “And I didn’t want to fuck that up, I guess, no matter why it was happening.” 

Sam stared. Dean’s face was ripped, now, the starlight catching it wrong. 

He looked dead. Worse than dead. Haunted. 

And that should have dented Sam’s rage, he knew. His fear. But they’d already escaped.

“But you don’t have the right to make that choice for me!” Sam shouted. “Damn it! You’re the one who’s always preaching about free will! About not being bitch puppets for the Lord or whatever! And yet here you are, man, and given the choice, hey, you just pick up the angel playbook and treat me like a character, somebody you can write the future for and if that’s not what I want, well, fuck me! Because you’re the one with the power, with the magical texts or something, and damn if you’re not gonna use it!”

Dean slid down the side of the car in slow motion, his face in his hands, and fell in the dirt. And if he was crying, Sam ignored it, pretended he didn’t hear over the rush of blood in his ears. 

“I’m sick of this!” he yelled. “You and your self-righteous bullshit! I‘ve had enough of it, Dean.”

Dean looked up, his head pitching back just enough so Sam could see his eyes. This horrible mirror image of before, when Sam had looked down and watch Dean burn for him, love him, want him, as he came, as he poured everything he had into Dean, gave him all that he could.

But that hadn’t been him, not really. That’d been some fictional version of him, something Dean and Chuck had written, manipulated, shaped without his consent. And they’d made him feel—god, they’d made him feel like—

“Fine,” Dean managed. “Fine. I don’t blame you. I don’t.”

He looked so open, so vulnerable and sad, that it hurt to look at him.

So Sam stopped.

Turned away and bolted across the field, over a ditch, and back onto the asphalt. He sprinted away from the light and the car and Dean and all the fucked-up nonsense that still lay locked between them. 

The night air cut into his lungs. Burned. And when he stopped, fumbled for his phone, for Ruby, he told himself that’s where the ache in chest was from. 

Told himself that all he could hear was the dial tone. That he couldn't still hear Dean sobbing for him in the dark.


	8. Chapter 8

Dean lay in the dirt for a while, trying in vain to wake up. 

Because surely he was dreaming. It sure as hell felt like a nightmare.

He was alone. Sammy was gone. And he'd managed to fuck it up but good this time.

He leaned back against the Impala and wept, in a way he hadn't been able to in a long time. It felt like years.

But here, it was only one: since right before he died, the second time. Right before he went to Hell. 

And Sammy had been with him, that last time. Had sat next to him on the bed, tucked Dean’s head under his chin and not said a word. And when Dean had wobbled, when his spine suddenly went voom, Sam’d been there to catch him, to hold him and soothe him and run those big fingers through his tears, hold the water in his palms and whisper: “Dean. Dean.” 

And Sam had held him tight, then, like his arms alone could hold back Hell, until he'd finally slept, lulled by the catch of Sam’s breath. By the feel of his name in Sam’s mouth, pushed hard against his hair.

“Dean. Dean.”

But Sammy wasn't there to catch him this time, so he fell, keeled right the fuck over until his lips were sucking dirt and his palms burned with the rocks he clutched like they were the only things keeping him from falling right back down into the Pit.

Which was where he felt like he belonged, at that moment.

He'd almost gotten what he wanted, what he'd been hoping for when he'd pulled Baby off the road and parked her out under this open sky. The story was called “If That’s What It Takes Me,” and it was the last one—he'd sworn it to himself—the very last one he was gonna test before he came clean, laid the whole sorry tale out for Sam and explained what the hell'd been going on with Grace and Chuck. Everything he’d been able to figure out.

The last one. Honest.

But something must have gone wrong because they'd veered off script from the get-go, Sam slamming him into the trunk and getting all grabby and angry and mean and making Dean crazy, making him go out of his freaking mind and beg Sam to fuck him.

None of that was in the cards. Not in Grace's version, anyway, which was all rainbows and flowers and soft kisses and Sam going to pieces under Dean’s hands as Dean slowly, slowly drove him over a cliff with long, teasing touches and his mouth tucked under Sam’s ear, promising that he’d take care of him, that he’d get Sam there, wherever it was Sam wanted to go. That he’d never leave him hanging, never leave him out to dry, until finally Sam curved like a bow under his hands and came up tight into Dean’s mouth, grinning like an idiot and happy. So happy.

Until he sprang and pushed Dean back into the seat, yanked his jeans down, and stretched him open easy, giving that slow right back to him, knuckle by knuckle, until they were both moaning, until Sam rolled one on and pushed into him, all the space inside his head, all the room that was there for thinking forced out and away and, god, Dean had wanted that. From Sam.

But, yeah, there’d been none of that slow or steady or sweet and the whole thing had felt different, had seemed more real and immediate and angsty as fuck, and then, despite all of that, Dean had managed to work in his favorite line: I love you.

And instead of falling into his arms and cooing or some beautiful dumb shit like that, Sam had gone postal and run off god knew where and Dean had been reduced to making mud puddles with his goddamn tears, pebbles digging into his face and come hardening on his stomach. He felt completely and utterly disgusting and maybe that was his lot by rights now. Maybe it was exactly what he deserved.

Fuck.

It was tempting to lie there and wallow. So he did, for a while.

But then reality kicked in hard and fast, and he realized that if he didn't want to make the papers, to horrify some passerby as soon as the sun came up, he'd better get a move on.

He creaked his way up, found his clothes. Made no effort to clean up because as this point? It was a lost fucking cause. He was.

He folded himself behind the wheel and drove.

On to Meeshaw, Michigan, the little crap town where Cas was waiting or hovering or whatever the fuck it was angels did when their humans were running late.

It made sense to him to keep moving. Sam knew where they'd been headed, and if he wanted to find Dean after he finished scrubbing himself with a Brillo pad or whatever, then he'd know where to look.

So what was the point in circling those country roads in the dark, hoping to catch a glimpse of Bigfoot in the headlights? None.

Didn’t stop him from doing it, though, at least until his face dried up and he could see straight again.

Then he drove right through, past sunrise and into the day. Pulled into the first motel inside the city limits and made a beeline for the shower.

Leaned back and let the spray sandblast his face. Tried to blank out the past 12 hours. Forget Sam’s face, before and after. Take away the memory of Sam’s hands, his chest, his voice. The feel of his throat under Dean’s lips. The way his pulse fluttered under Dean’s tongue as he came.

He rubbed himself raw with the thready washcloth and two bars of soap. Got the crud off, pulled the dirt out from under his fingernails, but still. Couldn’t make the ache go away.

If he’d wanted this, wanted Sam, he knew: he shoulda just asked for it, instead of convincing himself he was just working a job, testing a hypothesis, letting Sam kiss him for science, or some shit.

Like right now. He could just call Sam. Explain it all. Ask him real nice to come back. Promise not to jump him at the soonest opportunity.

But. 

That would mean taking ownership of this thing. Accepting responsibility. 

Which he should. Which he would.

But.

The phone rang while he was shaving, and apparently his heart hadn't gotten the "it's all fucking hopeless" message because for a second—this awesome, golden blink—he was sure it was Sam.

"Hey," he said, a little breathless, folding the phone to his ear.

"Uh, hi," Chuck said, and there went the house of cards. Damn it.

"You are the last person I wanna talk to," Dean hissed, happy to let self-loathing get swallowed by fury. "Seriously, dude. Now is not a good time."

Chuck huffed. "Don't get pissed at me, asshat. I'm not the one who fucked this up. Who chased Sam away."

"But you TOLD ME not to tell him!" Dean shouted, and yeah. That kinda felt good. 

"I told you that you'd have to figure it out on your own, ok? What was going on with Grace's stuff. Not that you'd then need to lie to Sam about it! That was all you, buddy. Your little contribution to this story."

"Fuck me," Dean growled. "Semantics, man. It's all semantics." 

"Only you, Dean, " Chuck groaned. "Only you could take like happiness on a platter and turn it into a freaking piñata." He shifted, and it sounded like he was Scrooge McDucking through a paper mill. "Dude, Grace was trying to give you something. A gift. You know it; you've thought it. She might have wrapped it up in porn instead of a nice big bow, but still. She wanted you all—your fictional selves, anyway—to have a happy ending. However you could get it."

"But she did more than that, man,” Dean said, sitting heavy on the bed. “She hoodoo'd on us, or something. The real us. Made us do stuff—"

Chuck scoffed. "That you've always wanted to do, apparently. Yeah, what a raging bitch."

"Damn it! It's not that simple and you know it. I mean, ok, maybe it's what I've—maybe I'm not totally opposed to the idea of, whatever, but it isn't right to force it on us."

"On Sam," Chuck prompted. "That's what you mean, right? Because you are _so_ ok with it, sunshine, that it's not even—"

"Shut up, Chuck."

Chuck sighed, long-suffering and whiskey dry. "Look, you can't have it both ways. You can't bitch about God having a plan for you or whatever, about other people deciding for you, and then complain when you have a chance to make those choices on your own."

"No, that's not what I'm—"

"No, it's _exactly_ what you're doing!" Chuck snapped. "Jesus Christ, dude. Don't try and pull that crap with me. I know what's going on your head and your pants all the freaking time, ok? You think I _want_ to know that? You think I give a shit about whether you think you deserve to be happy or whatever? Fuck, Dean. I got archangels lurking in my front yard, practically, got God or whatever breathing down my goddamn neck, and I do not have time to worry about your self-esteem issues, ok? I am not your After-School Special! So pull your head out of your freaking ass and call Sam. Or don't. Go for a happy ending. Or not. Just leave me the _fuck_ out of it."

Dean sat back, reeling. 

"Wow, did I just say that?" Chuck said. "Huh. Been a bad week, man."

There was a sudden rush of fuzz, a bright noise like a TV jumping to life. 

"Oh hey," Chuck said, muffled. Then: "Gotta go, Dean. The Archangel Orkin man is here. Some kind of demon action in the neighborhood, or something. So. Yeah. Um. Good luck. You’re gonna need it.”

Dean dropped the phone and let himself fall over. Ducked his head into the pillows and resisted the urge to beat his head into the motherfucking wall.

And then he heard that familiar flicker of wings and his day got even more—awesome.

**

To her credit, Ruby didn't ask him a lot questions. Not at first.

When she finally pulled up, he'd been standing in the dark for three hours, the smell of Dean's skin trapped in his head and this terrible, sick feeling in his gut that he'd made a huge mistake.

Something pretty epically bad.

So by the time she showed, he was exhausted, post-sex high fried, his adrenalin drained, and he just pitched over in the front seat and slept.

It was easier that way.

When he woke up, they were two states away and still moving, still putting miles between him and Dean.

Still, she didn't ask, but by then, it was like an infection, something dug in him that he had to get out. So he turned his face to the window and laid it out, skirting the schmoop and his confusing maybe-feelings and focusing on the part he knew she'd like best: Dean's betrayal. Dean as manipulative dick. Dean trying to make Sam into something he wasn't.

“So,” she said when he was done. “You're fucking."

"Jesus!" he barked.

She shrugged, that same easy motion he'd seen a thousand times. Never seemed so callous, before.

“That's what you said, Sam. Don't get pissed at me because you're fucking your idiot brother.”

“Whatever,” he gritted.

“I mean,” she said, giving a Mazda the bird, “he is an asshole. That's not exactly a news flash, sport.” 

She looked over, and for a second Sam thought he saw sympathy there. Which was disconcerting, from a demon. 

“And it's not like you wanted it, right? It wasn't something you've done on your own, is it?”

“No, I don't think—”

She cut him off. “Exactly. So when you get down to it, Sam: he practically raped you.”

He gaped at her, his fingers digging into the door. “What?!”

“You heard me. Don't be so coy about it." She gave him this doe-eyed thing, sweet cut through with scorn. "It's ok to admit that you're a victim.”

Sam could feel his blood boiling, because _no_ , this wasn’t—Dean hadn't—

“Ruby,” he hissed. “That's not what I said. You’re just twisting my—”

“Oh!” she said, faux bright brittle. “So you wanted it, huh? To have sex with your brother? That was your choice?” She turned her head, and the face she gave him was all demon. “I knew you were kinky, honey, but I gotta say: I'm impressed. Didn't know you had it in you.”

Sam felt the black in eyes come all the way up to meet hers. “Stop the fucking car!”

She just laughed, black to black. “No. Sit back and shut up. We'll be there soon enough, and then you can take it out on me. Put all of that anger to good use, huh?"

Her fingers climbed over his thigh in that way that usually made him spark, made him grab for her and bare his teeth. But the spark didn't catch this time, not with Dean's come still on his hands and his knees aching where he'd banged them into the trunk over and over and over again.

Still. Something in him responded, still shivered under her touch. It was enough to calm him down, at least. To put the rage back in the box, for now. Because she was right. He was gonna need it. Later.

He locked his hand over hers and leaned back. Took a deep breath.

"Where're we going?" he asked, his voice heavy and slow.

"Meeshaw, Michigan,” she said. "Lots of demon-on-demon action up there. Might be a seal."

“That’s where Dean and I were going.”

She smiled at him. “I know, sweetie. But don’t worry. We’ll take care of this—whatever it is—before the ox even gets there. Now. Why don’t you get some rest? Just in case it really is Lilith, this time.”

He closed his eyes—obedient, automatic—and remembered: Lilith. That's what was really important here. The end of freaking days. Dean he could deal with. They could. Later.

He drifted back off with her fingers ghosting, the pulse of her blood singing him to sleep.


	9. Chapter 9

“Dean,” Cas said from the doorway. “The demons are moving. It is urgent that we—”

He stopped. Turned in a slow circle.

“Where is Sam?”

Dean met his gaze and let Cas get a good fucking look. Watched him blanch.

“What has happened?” 

Dean sighed. “It’s a long story.”

Most other people would have taken that as a hint to either ask questions or leave the way they came in, pronto, but Cas did neither. Just stood there like a sapphire statue. Staring. Waiting for Dean to do all the work, as always.

So Dean tried to explain, and it was going about as well as could be expected, what with the whole “I’ve been sleeping with Sam” scenario, until Cas got his teeth caught on the whole notion of “fan fiction,” which just seemed to confuse the shit out of him.

“But,” he said. “Dean. The Winchester Gospels are—they are _Truth_. They are the Word of God. Why would anyone wish to—rewrite them?”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Cas, the people that read Chuck’s shit don’t know they’re reading scripture, ok? They think they’re just like supernatural Robert Ludlum, or something.”

Cas looked dubious. Plugged in his Angel of the Lord voice.

“What has been written cannot be unwritten. What God has set into motion, no one, human or angel can—”

“Look, calm your tailfeathers, fluffy. We’re not talking about people trying to undo God’s plan. They’re just—looking for an excuse to write porn.”

Cas frowned. “So. In these stories. You are—engaging in physical intimacy. With Sam.”

“Yeah.”

“But. Why would anyone wish to write that? Or even read it." He made a face. "It does not sound—appealing.”

Dean shook his head. Trying not to smile.

“I’ll tell you what, Cas. I’m gonna grab some food, ok? You”—he grabbed Cas by the shoulder and parked him at the desk—“are gonna sit here and read some of this shit. Then we’ll at least have a common language to work from, because fuck if I can explain human female behavior to you, man.”

Cas looked nine kinds of flustered as Dean leaned over him, opened the laptop, and brought up Grace’s site.

“But,” he said meekly. “Dean. I do not—I am not familiar with the generic conventions of this type of literature. I am not certain that I will be able to evaluate its—”

Dean patted him on the head and headed for the door.

“You’ll get the hang of it real quick. I promise.” He pointed. “Now. Read.”

**

His burgers came out tofu the first time, much to his disgust, so he’d killed almost an hour at the counter by the time he made it back, working through the fries even as he came through the door.

Cas was right where he’d left him, staring blankly at the screen.

But.

He looked a little—off.

His tie was loose, the first few buttons blown. The coat was in a khaki pool at his feet. 

And his face was fire engine red.

“Uh, Cas?” Dean said, knocking the door closed. “You ok?”

Cas didn’t answer, just gave him a glassy-eyed stare.

Dean wrangled dinner onto the nearest bed. “Dude,” he said, feeling a little panicked, because what if there was something he hadn’t accounted for, maybe something in those texts designed to zap angel mojo or whatever? Because Cas looked like his mojo was way the fuck out of whack. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Dean,” Cas croaked. “I did as you asked. I read.”

“Ok. And? It break your brain or something, all that sex?”

“Um,” Cas said, reaching for new levels of scarlet. “I would not put it in—quite those terms.” 

Dean froze mid-bite, french fries dangling from his fingers.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. Cas. You didn’t—you didn’t _like_ that shit, did you?”

Cas made a vague noise.

“That didn’t sound like a _no_ ,” Dean said.

Cas shifted in his chair and looked like he was seriously considering the 100-yard dash.

“It was not—unpleasant,” he managed. “In terms of its literary qualities. But I did not anticipate the—explicitness? Of its contents?”

Dean pitched over, laughing.

“Oh, Cas,” he said. “I tried to tell you. What did you think ‘intimacy’ meant?”

Cas flailed. “I thought perhaps you and Sam shared a meal, or slept in the same bed, or shared your deepest thoughts about the meaning of life. ‘Frotting’ was not a concept that I had anticipated.”

Dean blushed and tried to rally a little sympathy. 

“Well, did it help you understand what I was talking about?” he said, scrambling up. “About the fan fiction, I mean.”

Cas frowned. “Yes, in a way. But what I could not discern is why any of these—texts would affect you and Sam in the manner that you have described.”

Dean’s heart sank.

“So you didn’t see any juju in the letters, any spells or demon-y crap or—“

“No,” Cas said. “Just a lot of fucking.”

Dean choked.

“And I did not know that oral pleasure was in so many instances considered the equal to, if not superior of, anal penetration—“

And Dean had to stick his fingers in his ears and sing half of _Dark Side of the Moon_ before Cas would shut up about all his awesome newfound knowledge, which. Yeah.

“So,” Dean said, still wincing. “You can’t see anything there, huh? Man.”

“Why have you not contacted the author?” Cas asked, sliding his tie back into place. Mostly.

“Can’t. She’s dead.”

Cas stopped, his fingers curled around his coat. “She’s dead?”

“Yeah, Grace. Didn’t you see the—?”

And Cas vanished.

“Oh, great. Thanks a lot!” Dean shouted. “That’s really freaking helpful, the way you just up and disappear in the middle of—”

“She’s in Heaven,” Cas said, his breath moving over Dean’s ear.

“Jesus!” Dean barked, jumping straight up.

“No, Grace,” Cas said. Looking like himself again. 

Dean felt like he was two beats behind. “So what?”

“So. You should speak with her.”

Dean blinked.

“She—how? Why? I mean, what good would that do?”

“I have asked her what her intentions were,” Cas said, running his hand gingerly over his head. “She meant you no harm, Dean.”

Dean tried to process that. “She thought I was a fictional character, Cas! Of course she didn’t mean me any harm.”

“Ah,” Cas said. “Yes. Still. I think it would be helpful. You understand the situation much more clearly than I. I do not think I was able to explain it as—effectively as you will. So.”

Dean saw a flash of Cas’ fingers, got started on a protest, and by then it was too late.

**

“Wait,” Dean said slowly. “Where are we?”

“Heaven,” Cas said, the _duh_ just barely unspoken.

Dean did a slow turn.

Outside, it was grey and a little dim, afternoon slipping down into dusk. Inside, the kitchen was warm, the light tinny but bright, slipping into the grooves and cracks worn into the walls, the counters, the floor. It was a place that had been lived in, maybe even loved, for a long time.

Somebody was in the middle of baking, flour spread over a board and a ball of dough resting in the center.

“This doesn’t look like any Heaven I’ve ever read about,” he said.

Cas sighed. “Dean. Heaven is what you wish for it to be, each soul. For Grace, this is hers.”

Like that was enough information. Please.

But then there was a figure in the doorway.

“Hey,” Grace said. “You must be Dean.”

Her hand was firm in Dean’s; tiny, yeah, but no slouch in the grip department. 

She looked—normal. Maybe that’s what threw him off. Dark blond hair that didn’t know what to do with itself. Blue eyes. Brown corduroy blazer and boots, jeans starting to crack at the knees and a black t-shirt. 

He’d been expecting—what? A girly girl dressed like a unicorn, maybe? Somebody in ribbons and pink, at least. 

“Um,” she said. “Can I have my hand back?”

She quirked an eyebrow and he laughed, let her go.

“Right,” he said. “Sure. You probably need that.”

She shot Cas a look that Dean couldn’t read and slid past him, reaching for something under the table.

“You want a beer?” she asked, coming with two green bottles. 

“Ok,” he said, reaching. Trying not to make a face when he saw the cap.

She laughed. “I know, I know. It’s my own kind of Heaven and all I have is Rolling Rock. What can I say?”

She moved past him again and headed down the hallway.

“Come on in. More room to talk in here.”

Dean trailed after her, staring at the dusty photos on the wall, at the brightly colored frames and the people in swimsuits, at barbecues—none of whom seemed to be Grace.

In the living room, the window looked out onto what looked like a lake—there were a couple of cars outside, a scrub of beach, and then this grey ripple that stretched out to the horizon. It was beautiful, somehow, even in the rain, and Dean was willing to bet that when the sun was shining, it was fucking gorgeous.

“We’re on Lake Winnipesaukee,” Grace said, tucking herself into an armchair. “It’s almost December. You should see it in June.” 

“Yeah,” Dean said, and ok, yeah. It was a little awkward. Being in Heaven. In someone else’s Heaven. Someone he didn’t know but who, apparently, knew him—the fictional him, anyway—a little too well.

And Cas wasn’t helping, what with his protective swooping stance in the corner.

Dean cleared his throat and scooted into the nearest chair, this rackety wood thing that would probably crack at the first opportunity, what with the way his day was going. Hell, his whole year.

He glanced up and Grace was looking at him with a not-dissimilar expression of: _what the hell_?

“So,” she said.

“So,” he said.

There was a nice long pause.

“So you’re real,” she said. Grinning.

He kinda had to smile back. “Yeah. Apparently.”

She shook her head and took a long pull on her beer. “Wow,” she said. “Somehow, I find that harder to believe in than angels—maybe what with being in Heaven and all, I guess.”

Cas ruffled his feathers. “Thank you for not hitting Dean over the head with a frying pan.”

Dean choked on his beer.

“You hit Cas?” he managed.

Grace blushed. “Hey. I’ve been by myself for a long time, ok? No one’s ever just wandered in here before.”

Dean grinned. “So your first thought was—”

“Demon, yeah. Of course,” she said, showing her teeth. “Blame Shurley for that one. Or, ah. I guess I should blame you.”

Awesome awkward silence again.

“For the record, I am not a demon,” Cas intoned.

Grace snorted, and Dean shot beer out of his nose, and ok, that got them past some of the worst of it, anyway.

“Dean,” Grace said then, leaning into the light. “What happened? What did I do? I mean, Cas told me some of it, I think, but he got a little hung up on the sex, you know—“

Cas shifted uncomfortably.

“So I’m not sure that I understand exactly. He said my fic has been—making you guys do stuff that you don’t want to do.” She looked stricken. “I thought you guys were characters. That you weren’t real. That if I was fucking with anybody, it was Shurley. I hope you know that I didn’t mean to—I wasn’t trying to—“

Dean sighed. 

He leaned back in that creaky ass chair and laid it all out on the table: the sex. The rapid amnesia. Their realization of what was happening. Chuck. Mini-golf. His own assumptions. His mistakes. Sam’s reaction. All of it.

She didn’t say a word, just pitched forward and listened, her whole body tuned to what he was saying. 

When he finished, he put four on the floor and drained the rest of his beer.

Grace’s eyes were fixed over his shoulder, lost somewhere out in the grey. Thinking.

Cas was looking at him, something frank and sad on his face that Dean didn’t really feel like seeing. So he got up, went out to the kitchen, and fished two more beers out of the cooler. Took a minute to breathe in the smell of turkey cooking. Of the fresh dough that was somehow still resting on the counter.

He pushed the bottle into Grace’s hand and asked: “Hey, is it Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah,” she said absently. “2003.”

She sat up and pushed a hand back through her hair, a gesture her hair didn’t seem to appreciate. 

“All the stories that you mentioned,” she said slowly, waving the strands away from her face. “The titles. I don’t know if it matters, but I wrote all of those at kind of the same time. A few months before I died.”

Dean frowned. “How can you remember that? You wrote a hell of a lot of stuff.”

She met his eye and smiled around the beer. “Yeah,” she said. “But those stories—I was going through this big Foreigner thing at the time. So the stories that I wrote then, the ones you and Sam got caught up in? They all got stuck with titles from the lyrics of, uh, ‘Feels Like The First Time.’”

Dean started laughing. “What?! That is such a terrible song!”

“Hey, in my defense, I was high on meds! It was the last time I really got to write before the fucking drugs took over!” Grace managed. “And you’ve got no right to mock my musical taste, Mr. REO Speedwagon!”

“Dude, REO Speedwagon is awesome. Foreigner is weak.”

“Bullshit. Tell me you don’t know all the words to ‘Jukebox Hero.’”

Dean pointed his beer at her. “That is totally not the point. Music can be memorable and still fucking suck!”

Now they were both giggling, Grace in a heap over one of the arms and Dean tipped so far back he could see the lake shimmering behind him.

“I do not understand,” Cas said. “You are both missing the point of import here.”

Dean looked up, wiping the water from his eyes. “Oh yeah. And what’s that?”

Cas ignored him. “Grace, you wrote these—texts as your physical form was dying?”

She met his eye. “Yes.”

“Just before you died?”

She shifted under angel gaze on stun. “More or less, yes.”

“Hmm,” Cas said. And disappeared.

“He does that a lot,” Dean said, by way of explanation.

“Huh,” Grace said. 

Dean stood up and stretched. “So this isn’t your house, is it.” 

“No, it’s not.” She laughed. “Believe it or not, I couldn’t tell you whose it is.”

“That doesn’t make any kind of sense,” Dean said.

She paced over to the window, leaned her back against the pane. “It’s November 2003, for me. Thanksgiving, like you said. I was working for a presidential campaign up here in New Hampshire. Too far to go home, and not enough time to, anyway. So a bunch of us that were kind of homeless for the day, we all came up here, to this supporter’s house by the lake.” 

Dean kept his mouth shut and drank his beer.

“And—it was a great day, Dean. What can I tell you? Hanging out with the people I didn’t know, but who were all generally cool and groovy. We just sat in the kitchen all day and watched the talented among us cook and drank beer and it was the most relaxed I can ever remember being, on Thanksgiving.” She gave him a sheepish smile. “Maybe a little more than that, huh? If this is my idea of Heaven.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears and suddenly she looked really fucking young, to Dean.

“So your idea of Heaven has no family in it?” he said, reaching for gentle.

“Pretty much,” she said. Her face shifted. “Although Cas was saying that—“

“It was you,” Cas intoned, suddenly right the fuck over Dean’s shoulder.

They both jumped.

“Grace,” Cas said, in that _I am a celestial being_ way he had. “It was you.”

She looked terrified, and frankly, Dean didn’t blame her.

“I—Castiel, what did I—?” she gasped, backing into the curtains.

“Dude,” Dean said. “Turn the righteous down a little, ok? There’s no need to be a dick about it.”

Cas blinked at him. 

“Grace,” he said, turning up the treble. “Your death—was slow. Gradual. As such, your passage into the divine was—incremental. Piece by piece, rather than all at once. What can happen, sometimes, in such cases, is that the divine can—pierce its way through the veil.”

Dean frowned. “Wait, so the divine can spring a leak?”

Cas gave him a look. “I believe that is what I said, Dean.”

“But what does that have to do with my fics?” Grace asked, still balled up in the window sash. 

“Oh,” Cas said. “Yes. Well, as the ‘leaks’ occurred, I believe some of their energies made their way into your work. This has been known to happen, on occasion. Sometimes it is mistaken for some sort of divine intervention. da Vinci has been read in that way. As I believe, will someone you call Justin Timberlake.” 

Dean resisted the temptation to give the lump on Cas’ head a twin.

“You’re losing the thread again, man.”

Cas shook his head. “That is impossible, Dean. I am not weaving.”

Grace snickered. “Are you guys like this all the time?”

“No,” they said in unison, and that only made her laugh harder, the sound a little desperate.

Cas sighed. “Those stories you wrote—the ones that Dean has detailed—they were infected, of a sort, by the divine.” He tilted his head. “The—emotion with which you invested your work. Your affection for Dean. It acted as a sort of conduit for that divinity, and created an accidental prophecy, of sorts.”

Dean heard Chuck’s voice in his ear, a little drunken whisper: “Dude, Grace was trying to give you something. A gift.” 

He looked over, and Grace’s face was stuck halfway between “this is awesome” and “please don’t smite me.” She caught his eye and her face went to 11 on “no smite.”

“Dean,” she said. “I’m sorry. Believe me, I didn’t mean for—I mean, I had no idea that—”

“I know,” he said, reaching for her hand. “I know.” He squeezed her fingers, which were, god, like ice, until she relaxed a little. Looked a little less likely to run. “’S ok,” he said. “Really. It’s ok.”

She curled her hand in his and held on, for a moment.

“So if it’s not a spell,” she said. “How will you break it?”

“We cannot,” Cas said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “But you can.”

So that’s how Dean ended up in the front room of a summer house in New Hampshire in the middle of winter, smack dab in someone else’s Heaven, caught in a circle of salt with a couple of candles burning, the air inside heavy and sweet with a pie that would be perfect for all eternity, his hands caught in Grace’s, her eyes in his, and both of them grinning like idiots.

There was no actual ritual they could turn to, no lore about this kind of thing, even in Heaven. Maybe especially there. But Cas was pretty sure that all they had to do was make an effort, for Grace to release him from her accidently divine whatever and everything would be peaches and cream.

Aside from the whole “Sam is missing” bullshit they’d have deal with eventually, but. One problem at a time.

Besides, Grace had ritual making experience. 

She cleared her throat. “Now,” she said, in a voice that echoed Castiel’s. “Dean Winchester. I, Grace Delaney, release you and your brother from any and all obligations to my Word.” She shot her eyes at Cas angel-ing in the doorway, her lips twitching. 

“I, Dean Winchester, and my brother, Sam. We are so released,” Dean said, clinging to a straight face.

They both kind of looked around, waiting for lightning or the voice of the Lord or something. But there was just the sound of the rain and the hum of the baseboard heater and Dean figured, yeah. That was probably enough.

She squeezed his hands and grinned.

“Goodbye, Dean,” she said. “Take care of yourself. Be happy.”

He leaned down without thinking and kissed her cheek, the beer and silliness still warm in her face.

“You, too,” he said. “You too.”

Which was maybe a weird thing to say to somebody who was already in Heaven, but it felt right.

He felt Cas behind his back a moment before he felt the touch, and then.

They were back in his dumpy motel room not a moment after they’d left, food still on the bed and the laptop still open, still blinking.

Dean shot his hands through his hair. Found his clothes still smelled like Thanksgiving.

“Cas,” he said, his voice maybe a little tight. “She really up there alone? I mean, there’s nobody, for her? Is that how Heaven works? Everybody isolated and alone all the time?”

Cas gave him a little smile. “Why would you think that?”

“Well, she’s up there right now, rattling around in that big house by herself, right? So—“

“Dean,” Cas said. Gentle. “Not all soulmates die at the same time. She will have hers. He will have his. In time.”

Dean looked at him, saw the softness sneak out that Cas was so good at hiding, sometimes.

“Ok,” he said. Gruff. “Ok. Soulmates, huh? That’s good.”

“Whatever happens,” Cas said. “You won’t be alone. I promise you that.”

Dean scrubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Tired,” he said. “Cas. I just need to—“

“Rest,” Cas whispered, his fingers cool on Dean’s forehead. “Goodnight, Dean.”

The pillows, the bed, they came up in a rush and Dean. Slept.


	10. Chapter 10

When they finally got to Meeshaw, Sam felt sick.

He thought he'd feel better after a shower. Especially after Ruby knocked him into the motel room door, slid her hands over his crotch and purred, "Let me lick him off you, baby." And there was something in her voice, her smell, her smile that turned his stomach. He bolted. Threw her off like she was paper and buried himself under the spray.

But that didn't help.

Then he thought: food.

He looked around Ruby's pouts, wincing at the slick stiff of his messy clothes, and dragged her to a diner, where even two plates of french fries couldn't wipe away her scowl. She kept staring at him like his face was about to melt.

"What?!" he barked, slamming his coffee on the table. "Something you wanna say?"

She just blinked at him, all slow and dark-eyed. Not black, but close enough.

"No," she said, her fingers skittering over his. "No."

And that made it worse, somehow. Because he knew her. Knew her well enough to know that she was lying.

He wasn't so hungry after that.

The sun was setting when she brought the car to a stop near the house on Nettimore Drive, the one she was sure was the demons' flophouse. They sat for a minute, watching, waiting, part of him keeping an eye peeled for the Impala, and when he realized that, the sick sad hit him in the gut again, and he thought:

 _Work. Doing the job. That'll make me feel better_.

Right.

He wanted to sneak in the back, try and catch them by surprise, but Ruby made the door before he did, kicked it in with a snarl, daylight be damned, and he had no choice but to hustle up after.

She was in the living room, standing stock still, because there were only bodies. No demons, nothing alive in that place. Just overturned furniture, broken glass, and bodies with burned-out eyes. And the sharp smell of oxygen, of air brighter than air.

She turned to him, furious. "Fucking angel," she spat. "Look at this crap. Jesus." She booted one of the corpses and it sagged back, bloody and slack.

Sam winced.

"Castiel?" he said, his voice a little too soft. 

And Ruby must have heard what he didn't say— _Dean_?—because she opened her mouth wide, bared her teeth at him like an angry dog. 

_A hellhound_ , he thought. _Someone's attack dog, anyway_.

"I don’t know," she hissed. "They all smell the same to me."

"So. No Lilith," he said, ashamed at the relief he felt, just then, even with his blood humming, the demon in his head still coiled and ready to strike.

She snorted. "No shit, Sam. You think this house would still be standing? You think we'd been seeing these cornhusks? No. You'd be standing on your brother's body right now, and I'd be carving up some angel hide to hang from my rearview mirror."

She shoved past him and made a beeline for the stairs.

“Check down here,” she ordered, her eyes flashing. “I’ll see if your little friend left any trash upstairs.”

He stood there, his boots locked to the floor, smelling blood and ozone and fear. 

He wasn't sure what it was, exactly. What he saw in that moment that he hadn't before. 

Maybe it was something he heard. The scratch of her voice, the glee, when her mouth folded over the image of Dean crushed beneath his boots. Of Cas' vessel stripped of its grace and defiled. Both of them a trophy, to her. 

That's what they'd be: proof of her prowess.

Even though she wouldn't have done the killing herself. 

Even though it was Lilith's hypothetical work she was reveling in. 

Something in his bones, his blood, his demon told him: 

 _She's hiding something_.

And:

 _She'd kill Dean in a second, if she had the chance_.

It sank into his head, that thought. Even as his eyes moved around the room, caught smashed photographs, books broken to ash, and bodies twisted and empty, he saw Ruby's knife in Dean's gut, ripping and tearing and carving his body up for Hell. Making him ready.

 _Like a hellhound_ , he thought again.

Then he had a flash, another picture of Dean, one from the night before. The planes of his face blurred in the moonlight, the stars burning in eyes. His hands seeping into Sam’s skin. The sketch of his mouth against Sam’s jaw, smiling; the wrong-right curl of his legs around Sam’s waist.

He got caught in an image, a memory, a knowledge of Dean’s love, as messed up and strung out and Winchester as it was, a living thing winding around them both, catching Sam’s heart in its leaves, leaves that smelled of gunpowder and salt and twenty years of whatever the fuck it was between them. Love. Devotion. Blood.

Whatever it was, he realized. It was good. Complicated and confusing as hell and possible illegal, but. Really, really good.

They’d already lost it once, lost each other, and he couldn’t through that again.

He wouldn’t. Because he’d seen it, what he’d become if he lost Dean for good.

That Sam, that burrowed out version of himself he’d been in the long stretch of the Trickster’s Wednesday: that’s the version Ruby wanted. The one she’d gotten a peek at during the months of Dean’s absence. The one she’d love to have fighting at her side, stretched out in her bed. Robo-Sam. Broken Sam.

Sam without Dean.

He heard Dean weeping in the dark, saw his shadow against the car in the moment before Sam had turned, put his back to his brother and run away. Run towards Ruby.

She banged back down the stairs, cursing, and flung open the front door.

“Sam!” she barked. “What’re you waiting for? Let’s go.”

Sam turned, saw her framed in the last of the sunlight. Her face was hidden, her hair a dark swirl against her shoulders, the knife a thin shadow at her hip.

She looked fierce and otherworldly and beautiful and suddenly, she was the ugliest thing Sam had seen in a long, long time.

He could still see Dean, the image trapped in the halo around Ruby. His mouth. His fingers. His face.

But all that anger, that fury he’d gathered like a lightning bolt and hurled straight into Dean’s heart, was slipping through his fingers like sand, the weight falling away and leaving his hand empty. Ready for the press of another palm, the one that’d always been there. Always would be, if Sam had anything to say about it.

He felt sick. But this time, he knew what would make him feel better.

Who.

"Ruby," he said. Calm. "You say another word about Dean—or Cas—and I'll cut your fucking throat."

She snorted and turned her back. Headed back out in to the light.

"Fuck you," she said. Easy. Jovial. "Come on, let's blow this popsicle stand before these bastards start getting ripe."

Sam took two steps and grabbed her, threw her back against the house. Her head caught the letterbox with a clang.

"Goddamn it—!" she swore and he got right in her face. Made his mouth move real the fuck slow, so she wouldn't miss a goddamn word.

"Ruby," he said again, letting his voice go silk. His hands come up and cradle her face. A lover, not a fighter. Watched her face flutter, her tongue trace her lips. Felt her body arch into him, like this was a game, like he was doing this for her.

Well.

He leaned in deep, put his mouth right over hers and waited until she moaned, tried to kiss him, but he held on tight. Put his eyes in hers and let himself go all the way black. "You so much as fucking _breathe_  my brother's name again and I'll send you straight back to Hell," he said. Soft. No reason to shout now. 

She squirmed, tried to rock him off, and he let his mouth curve. His voice drop. "And trust me, baby. I'll bury you so deep that it'll take you a century to even find the fucking door."

He backed away, let go, and she fell, her pretty face dazed and shaking.

He was halfway down the block before he heard her start screaming, throwing every profanity she could at the back of his head and shrieking about Lilith and his responsibility and for once, he didn't give a shit about that.

About saving the fucking world.

Yeah, he was running away from one problem.

No. He was running back to another. 

The most important problem in his bizarro life.

He jogged down the nearest side street and ducked into the woods. Ruby wasn't gonna give up that easy. No reason to keep himself in the open.

She'd find him soon enough. And so would Lilith.

For now, though. They didn’t matter.

He reached into his pocket and dialed the number without looking. Didn't realize he was holding his breath until he heard Dean grunt: "Sammy?"

"Hey," Sam said, his voice a little creaky. "Hey, Dean. It's me." 

Dean chuffed in his ear. "I think we've established that. Where are you? You ok?"

"Um. I'm fine. And I'm in Meeshaw. Right behind you guys, I think. Just came from that place on Nettimore."

"Hmmm," Dean said, loudly not asking a hell of a lot of questions that Sam could hear hovering on his tongue. "Describe it. I'll send Cas over to pick you up."

Sam heard Cas growl in the background: "You will not ‘send’ me anywhere, Dean. If I go anywhere, it is of my own free will—"

"Ok, ok," Dean sighed, his breath curling through the phone. "Chill out. It's just an expression."

Sam laughed, heard the noise come out of his mouth, all the tension he'd been carrying around for—what? Less than a day? Jesus, it felt like a damn month—tumbling out of him and scaring the fuck out of some birds, a big fluttery flush of them swinging out of the trees and over his head.

Or maybe it was just Cas. He heard the trenchcoat swirl, a raspy "Hello, Sam," and then he was somewhere else.

And there was Dean.


	11. Chapter 11

There was a nice long pause, one of those meaty ones that Dean could feel hanging in his ears.

They stared at each other, kind of rolling in the awkward. Because how was Dean supposed to start things off? _So, how’ve you been? How’s your demon bitch? Oh, by the way, about the fucking—_

"Um," he managed.

"Uh," Sam said, his eyes skittering over Dean’s face.

Dean looked down, got real familiar with the brown snake curl of the carpet.

Awesome.

Two tractors trailers thundered by, shook the windows, but still. In the room?

Silence.

Cas shifted, rattled his wings his coat expectantly. Dean could freaking feel that stare, those two angel pilot lights zeroed in on his face.

"Dude," he sighed. "Cas. Could you give us a minute?"

Cas blinked blue and disappeared. 

"I will return this shortly," he said from behind the desk, his fingers closing over the laptop.

Rattle wing woosh. Gone.

Sam turned, gave Dean the open-mouth gape. "Wait. What does Cas need with my laptop?!"

"Um," Dean said again, hiding his eyes behind his hand. "It's a long story."

He heard Sam's breath come out in a rush.

"Seems to be going around lately," he said, sotto voce. 

Dean shook his head.

"You don't even know," his mouth said before his brain could object. 

His eyes flew open with a _d'oh_! and, oh, there was Sam, all calm and together and shit, squinting at Dean in the yellow bright. The antithesis of last night's Sam: furious and beautiful and dark. 

And yet. It was still Sam.

 _Funny_ , Dean thought absently. _Funny how that works_. How one person can hold all of that in a single body, flash all of those faces in turn and still be _Sam_ , the one who was snapping an eyebrow to stun and saying "Dean?" like Dean had grown a second head or something. The same voice that had held his name in a vise the night before, rung all the sweet out of it, an accusation in one breath and a sonnet in an another. 

Sam might change his stripes, go from good to bad to gray and back, confused to all-the-fuck too certain, mouthy to scary silent, stupid hair to even stupider, but he was still Sam. Still the person Dean loved more than anything, even more than himself. And he had the scars to prove it.

But maybe that was the point.

Fighting, dying, bleeding. Taking a nice long vacation in Hell. All of that seemed a damn sight easier than living with it, with Sam, with all of that twisty bullshit in his heart and roped around his gut.

"Be happy," Grace had whispered.

And he'd thought he knew she meant, that he was totally clear on what happiness was to him. Happiness was knowing that Sam was alive, that he was freaking safe from whatever wanted to eat him or possess him or fuck him this month. It seemed like evil had a hard-on for Sammy, and happiness for Dean was cockblocking those sons-of-bitches and keeping Sam above the fray.

Which, to be honest? The kid hadn't been in a long, long time.

So maybe he had it backwards, all this lovey-dovey bullshit. What it meant for him to be happy. Maybe it was living for love, rather than dying.

Oh shit.

Dean could feel his brain stuttering, the wheels getting caught in the cogs or whatever, oil leaking and brakes squealing and yeah, here comes the crash.

The train went off the rails right in front of his eyes and he could see it reflected in Sam's frown, hear it in his grumbly "Dude, what's your problem?"

"I love you," Dean blurted, the words spilling over his chin.

Sam blanched.

"Uh, ok," he said. "Sure. I mean, I know you do, Dean, but that's not—"

"No," Dean said, clinging to whatever threads of courage he could get his hands on. "It is."

He took two steps and grabbed, tugging Sam by the waist with one hand and scrabbling for giant moose neck with the other. Sam made a "hmph!" noise and went still. Too still, his arms locked at his sides.

"Dean," he said, his breath skipping over Dean's forehead. 

The weird thing was that Dean could feel the difference, now, without the divine bullshit to hide behind. Could sense how much harder it was to hold onto Sam and look into his eyes and not flee in terror, in shame. He felt exposed, open and _seen_ way more than he had with his bare legs wrapped around Sam's hips, or balanced on Sam's lap with his cock in his fist, or shirtless and shaky as Sam pushed a needle through his skin and covered him with kisses.

All of those times, those first times, there'd been something extra there, a buzz in his body or a hum in his head, something that wasn't _them_ , exactly. Something that made it ok for him not to look too close, that’d let him fucking forget what’d happened between them. Let him slough off the sex and treat it as a problem to be solved, a mystery to be pieced together. Something that could be burned and banished, something he could be rid of.

And it was only in its absence, now, that he felt its presence then, whatever it was that Grace had given them.

Because this? His fingertips slipping over Sam's neck, his hand dug into Sam's belt, and Sam's freaking puppy eyes dropped down, way the fuck down, into his?

It was all him. All Sam. No mojo to blame anymore. Just them.

Sam shifted, let one arm curl, one hand press into the small of Dean's back. Tentative. Dean felt himself lean into it, his stupid bastard body doing exactly what it wanted without waiting for him to explain.

"I'm sorry," he muttered. "I should have told you what was going on. What Chuck said."

"Damn straight," Sam huffed. Squeezing, his hips tucking into Dean's. And that was—kind of good.

Dean swallowed. "It was a—kind of divine intervention. Accidentally."

He could feel Sam's eyebrows fire away.

"Dude. How the hell can divine intervention be accidental?"

"It's—it wasn't malicious," Dean said, his voice way breathier than he was comfortable with. Which had nothing to do with Sam's fingers bleeding heat into his back. No way. "It was—somebody who thought she was doing fictional us a favor. Letting us be happy together or some shit."

Sam snorted. Knocked his other arm around Dean's waist, which, again. Was a move that Dean could fully support.

"I have no clue what you're talking about," Sam rumbled, his voice locked deep in chest. Dean could feel it pooling around his heart, that voice.

"Cas took me to heaven,” he said, the words sounding not quite as ridiculous as they had in his head. “We, uh. We took care of it. So it's over. No more mojo."

"Hmmm," Sam murmured into his hair. "So if there’s no more mojo”—he pushed his lips to Dean’s temple, and they both shivered—“then what’s this?”

"Um," Dean managed, his lips full of plaid. "It's me. And you."

"Huh," Sam said. Thoughtful. 

**

Nobody moved. Unless you counted the sway of Sam's hips or the slip shake that sent up Dean's spine. Which Dean didn't. And neither did Sam.

**

Sam breathed in the smell of Dean's aftershave, of no-name shampoo and salt. That bittersweet Dean kind of clean.

He felt Dean's heart going hummingbird inside his chest, the sharp hitch in his lungs when Sam's fingers slid under his shirt and burrowed into the curve of his back.

This wasn't going to solve anything; Sam was sure of that. Whatever "this" was. Him and Dean. 

Ruby was out there, pissed as hell and packing the demon knife. And so was Lilith, a black-eyed bull in a china shop, leaving broken, bloody teacups in her wake. And the archangels, still anxious to do an Extreme Makeover on Dean's bag of bones.

Not to mention his own little problem, the song of demon in his blood that he couldn't quite quiet. That he wasn't sure if he really wanted to, yet.

Oh, yeah. And the fucking Apocalypse. Funny how far down that had fallen on the list.

So this, holding Dean in his arms, running his lips over the sweet slick of Dean's jaw, hearing the stutter step of his brother's breath right there in his ear: it wasn't gonna save the world.

No.

But maybe, just maybe. It'd keep him safe.

He thought of Ruby, her fury framed in that doorway, her hands all over his body, the cut tang of her blood in his mouth, and he felt—

Shame. 

For a moment, he was terrified: certain Dean could feel her in his pores, the quick crawl of her promises worming their way out of his mouth even as he tasted Dean, bit down just enough to make Dean twitch.

But Dean didn't run, didn't throw Sam aside and go for the holy water. 

No.

Dean just clung to him, the lines of his body echoing, amplifying his words:

 _I love you_.

And Sam did something funny then. Something he hadn't done in a long, long time.

He let himself believe that. That he was worth loving.

And in that moment? Well. He was saved.

He turned his head, his mouth reaching for Dean's, earning Dean's nails in his neck in return. Something between a hiss and a sigh, something that might have been his name, once, slipping over Dean's lips.

"Dean," Sam whispered, filling the word with more love than the syllables could hold. "I'm sorry."

"Damn straight," Dean huffed, and Sam shut him the fuck up the best way he knew how.

**

So this one's called "The Very First Time." 

Sam was kind enough to yank back the blankets before he tossed Dean's ass on the bed. Because he's a gentleman. Not gentle, mind you. But polite. Thoughtful, even as he tore off Dean’s shirt and physically assaulted his jeans, which frankly, didn't put up much of a fight. Unlike Dean.

"Jesus fuck, Sam!" he barked, or tried to. Hard to sound like a badass when you're totally out of breath, puffing like you've just run a marathon after just 10 minutes of climbing Mount Sasquatch.

But Sam didn't slow down until they were both naked, until he had Dean buried in the sheets, until his mouth was leading a pretty successful expedition to find the place on Dean's neck his chest his throat that would make him thrash and shake and sigh all at once.

Found it.

For the record, it was in the curve of Dean's neck, right at the bottom where the freckles bled into his shoulder.

Dean's head shot back and the noise that came out of his mouth was wounded and beautiful and so freaking happy that Sam started giggling, pushed his big grin into Dean's flesh and bit down so he could hear it again.

Dean pulled his hair hard, blunt fingers in dark waves, and heaved Sam's head up until his tongue found the smirk, until he could lick it off Sam's lips and swallow him whole.

It was little strange, maybe, digging into each other like that before it was even proper dark, when the shadows of the day still hung right outside the window, when real life was still spinning just beyond the door.

But time's a funny thing. Waits for no man, and all that shit. And after years of wasted time, time bound up in blood, smeared in sacrifice. They'd earned a little living.

Dean got a little antsy swimming in Sam, so he kicked them up after awhile. Got Sam sprawled over the bed with quick nips and the occasional slap and took his goddamn time. 

He got lost below Sam's ribcage, his palms slipping over the soft skin above Sam's hips, his tongue tracing circles just below. He kept watching Sam's face. That was the problem. It was like having the radio on too loud in the car, so loud that you sort of forgot where you were headed, what you were supposed to do with your hands on the wheel, lost in the noise and the heavy dull thump of the beat. That's what it was like for Dean, watching Sam's face flicker, a direct line from Dean's mouth, his hands, to Sam's cheeks, his eyes. It was sort of addicting, that teasing testing, and god, the arch of Sam's cock against Dean's chest wasn't so bad either.

Plus, it shut Sam up, which was a freaking miracle. Reduced him to hums and groans and these little sighs that made Dean feel like a freaking superhero, boiling down the big bad Sam, all long limbs and force of will, to a goddamn shiver shake.

It may have forced Dean to redefine awesome, that moment.

But it passed, as these things do, when Sam got grabby and pushed Dean's head down, rocking his hips into Dean's face and moaning: "Please. _Please_ , Dean! Jesus. Will you just—!"

That was more like it.

Dean nuzzled, he licked, he ghosted, until Sam was shouting, his hands clamped around Dean's ears and fucking _yanking_ until all Dean could do was open his mouth and take what was coming to him. What Sam was willing to give.

He snagged Sam's hips and drove him down, held him in the scratchy sheets and pulled that beautiful cock into his throat. It wasn't pretty or neat or skilled. No, Dean threw all of that shit out of the window because all Sam seemed to want was _him_ : his lips around the head, his fist around the shaft, his tongue tucked into the slit, and that was fucking golden, as far as Dean was concerned.

He felt Sam's hand on his face and he looked up. Watched those dark eyes get still, that face go steady and soft, so soft. And then Sam smiled, this gentle little curve that his body followed, the arch collapsing in Dean's mouth and sliding steady down his throat.

Sam went to jelly and Dean slid back up, fed Sam little slips of himself. Got them both a little drunk on that taste until it was Dean's turn to let himself be molded.

He wanted Sam to fuck him, wanted to get right back to that long dark close they'd found the night before without all the bullshit in between them this time, but his cock had other ideas, most of them involving _tongue_ and _Sam_ and _wet_ , so he went with it. Let Sam haul him onto his chest, plant Dean's knees next to his shoulders, and open that goddamn mouth.

Dean speared his fingers through Sam's hair, raised his hips once twice three, watched Sam smirk around his cock and that was all she wrote, darlin.’

When he was all shuddered out, Sam slipped him free, that smart mouth still muddled with come, and kissed the tip of his cock. And it was so gentle, so weirdly loving, even as Sam made some crack about men his age and his complete lack of stamina, even as he smacked the little bitch on the head and fell over, felt Sam curl around him, still giving him shit and totally earning that elbow to the ribs.

Yeah, he felt really weird; and for a second, he was afraid that Cas had been wrong, that Grace hadn't snapped the divinity or whatever.

But then Sam nuzzled his ear and sighed "Night, Dean," and Dean realized what it was. Why he felt so strange.

Oh. Oh yeah. He was happy.

**

Cas frowned at the screen and sat back. Traced his fingers over the keys. Let himself sigh a little too loudly.

Grace looked up from her book. “What? You didn’t like that one?” 

“It feels—unresolved.”

Grace grinned. “Of course it does. They haven’t finished it yet. That’s why it’s called a work-in-progress, Cas. I told you to avoid those.”

Cas twisted his vessel’s face experimentally, reaching for an arrangement of features that would appropriately convey his displeasure.

“But,” he said. “I do not understand. Why would someone begin a story and not finish it?”

“Hmmm,” Grace said, balancing the book on her knees. “Well, sometimes you start a story thinking it’s gonna go one way, and halfway through, it kinda changes directions on you.”

Cas shook his head. “Stories are not sentient beings. They cannot make decisions independent of their creator. They do not have minds of their own.”

For some reason, he noted, Grace found this simple statement of fact to be—amusing. Indeed, she threw back her head and laughed, a reaction that Cas found bewildering. Bordering on nonsensical.

“Oh, Cas,” she managed, after a time. “You try writing some fic, dude, and then we’ll talk about the relative sentience of stories.” She stood up, still giggling. “I need a beer. Be right back.”

Castiel watched the rain slide past the windows. He heard the low rattle of the heaters, the grey sigh of the wind. 

He frowned.

Pushed the keys as he’d watched Dean do.

Watched the white blink of the cursor for a moment.

And then he typed:

“Chapter 1.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all of you who've stuck with us! Fanspired and I had great fun working with this story, I've loved writing it, and we're both a little sad to see it end. Cheers for your feedback and encouragement for us to see this one through.


End file.
